What do Julian Assange, Ron and Rand Paul, and Matt Drudge have in common? Does it matter? What does it mean?
Discuss.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Very poor interpersonal skills.
ha!
Nice way not to understand the politics through personal smearing.
Julian Assange, Ron Paul, and Rand Paul have in common the fact that Ron Paul and Rand Paul called for ceasing the persecution of Wikileaks and Julian Assange is grateful for the support. And that is pretty much the only thing they have in common. Assange is pretty much equivalent of a US techie libertarian.
What Julian Assange and Matt Drudge have in common is that both found ways to innovatively use the internet to drive news stories. And that’s pretty much the only thing they have in common.
This question is equivalent to asking what do Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan have in common? Or what do Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have in common?
What it means for the blogs that are acting as if it is scandalous is that it is another way to attack Wikileaks as a news organization through guilt by association. Yeah, Assange like a lot of public political figures is an insufferable asshole. But Wikileaks has shaken the media enough that they want to use its material and snuff it out as a competitor that shows up their hypocrisy. And the fact that the Obama administration has come down like a ton of bricks on Wikileaks, essentiallty treating it as a terrorist organization is a profound embarrassment to a lot of liberal Democrats who would like to retreat into denial about what the US government has become.
With video of Assange
Julian Assange: I’m A ‘Big Admirer’ Of Ron Paul, Rand Paul
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/16/julian-assange-rand-paul_n_3768841.html
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange gave a strong endorsement to the libertarian wing of the GOP on Thursday, praising Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and his father, former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), for their political views.
“[I] am a big admirer of Ron Paul and Rand Paul for their very principled positions in the U.S. Congress on a number of issues,” Assange said during a forum hosted by Campus Reform and transparency organization OurSay.org. “They have been the strongest supporters of the fight against the U.S. attack on WikiLeaks and on me in the U.S. Congress. Similarly, they have been the strongest opponents of drone warfare and extrajudicial executions.”…
…The current libertarian strain of political thought in the Republican Party was the “the only hope” for American electoral politics, Assange concluded….
That’s what they have in common right there.
You can parse your viewpoint all you want. My parsing is that they are all libertarians and they are as much actively engaged in destruction of our system of government as the Tea Party. Not reform. Destruction. It takes work to build. Destruction is easy.
I respect your opinion, but do not share it in this case.
You think Obama and the larger Washington consensus on spying and security aren’t dstructive to “our system of government”?
In a word “no.”
I didn’t like the Patriot Act, I’m glad that it and anything related to it is in the process of reform. Spying has gone on since the beginning of time. We are idiots if we think we could not engage new technologies as part of that process because other governments certainly are. I don’t want our government taking a spoon to a gun fight.
No I don’t think the government should be taken down or taken apart. I think reform is an absolutely ongoing process that will always take place. I like our government and trust it much more than I do corporations or the military or little radical groups of militia men or others.
Those are human beings in the government. They are elected by us and then appoint or hire others. We are the government. And to me that doesn’t mean tear it down if I don’t like it.
I followed a link to an article printed during W’s reign and I felt sick to my stomach. No matter what rules we have in place men like Nixon, Bush and Cheney proved it doesn’t make any difference if the one running the show doesn’t respect this country.
Technology will not go away. Google and everyone else is spying on us and as individuals we can either go off the grid entirely or find ways to deal with it and keep our freedom. I don’t think you can get this toothpaste back in the tube. It’s here. The question I have is how we can reform it to fit the world we want to live in.
Julian Assange praises Matt Drudge as `news media innovator’
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/08/16/julian-assange-praises-matt-drudge-as-news-media-innovator/
“Wikileaks founder Julian Assange told a group of college students Friday morning that the “only hope” for U.S. electoral politics is Republican Sen. Rand Paul (KY) and his brand of Libertarian politics. According to the right-wing college news site CampusReform.com, the international fugitive and accused acquaintance rapist also heaped praise on right-wing blog mogul Matt Drudge, calling him a “media innovator.”
The remarks came as part of a live Q&A session with Assange and Campus Reform editor in chief Josiah Ryan….”
Ron Paul and Rand Paul called for ceasing the persecution of Wikileaks
Nope. No even close.
http://rt.com/usa/paul-wikileaks-information-whistleblowers-301/
I’m afraid the “personal smearing” is being carried out by your hero Assange. Did you even click BooMan’s link before accusing our host? Did you ever bother to look at what the Paul’s have said before assuming they called for Assange’s persecution?
That’s twice in one week.
Twice in one week that Julian Assange associated himself with Ron and Rand Paul, or twice in one week that you accused BooMan of doing so?
So, anyway, does the fact that your top-line argument for why this post is wrong turned out to be a 180 degree inversion of the truth influence your opinion in any way?
Twice in one week that you’ve pretended to know absolutely what my commitments are are what’s in my head. Stop the personalization.
You’re really, really, really determined not to admit you were wrong, aren’t you?
So, anyway, does the fact that your top-line argument for why this post is wrong turned out to be a 180 degree inversion of the truth influence your opinion in any way?
You really fail at reading comprehension.
I said that what they had in common was the Paul’s defense of Wikileaks. That is true. That is what Assange said. I said that Assange was an asshole. That’s my opinion that you maybe passed over too quickly.
Is Assange delusional about how like Assange’s positions the Pauls are? Likely. But so are a lot of folks who have a halo effect around one aspect or another of the Pauls’ very confusing political positions.
Your attempts to delegitimize my often complex opinions by personal pop pyschology and simplistic attacks are getting tiresome. And your halo effects around personalities as homimems that like the guilt-by-association comment below are over the edge.
Actually, what I passed over too quickly was your original comment:
You said ‘cessation.’
My bad.
Speed reading has its drawbacks some time. No problem.
Meanwhile, this is where we dumb Southerners are fighting the war for you.
Watauga County, NC: All Hell Broke Loose at the Board of Elections Meeting
The Ron/Rand Paul brand of “libertarianism” is undigested Ayn Rand without the good bits.
When someone points to Assange’s views about Ayn Rand’s philosophy, we can add that data to our assessment. So far Assange has limited his attention to foreign policy and not economic policy. Likely his Senate campaign will force him to address some things about Australia’s economy and possibly the global economy.
What will be interesting to see is how close the Wikileaks Party in Australia is to the Pirate Parties in Europe and Iceland.
Assange doesn’t come out the Ayn Rand “school.” Nor do the Pauls except for whatever the John Birchers appropriated from her. The Pauls are more like the Protestant version of Pat Buchanan than anything else; complete with his misogyny and racism. They’re filling that niche that’s appealing to younger men, mostly white, that have the delusion that their specialness can’t be fully actualized because government impedes them.
Meanwhile, on the grandstand:
They all subscribe to paranoid, anti-Washington, anti-liberal ideologies which are increasingly bleeding into each other. You could have listed Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Alex Jones as well: http://www.salon.com/2013/08/05/tamerlan_tsarnaev_21st_century_conspiracist/
TD is right. You really are into personal attacks and guilt by association, and it’s pretty tiresome. And unnecessary, because you’re smart enough to make your points without it.
Julian Assange is many things, some of them rather unpleasant. But he is not a terrorist, as your beloved Obama administration and you (by throwing in Tsarnaev’s name) would like people to think. And the literally thousands of revelations – most banal, some very definitely not – Wikileaks has made possible not just of the US government, but many governments and companies around the world, are not conspiracy theories. Nobody has questioned the accuracy of what WL reveals, just its appropriateness in doing so.
Assange’s take on the Pauls is kind of ridiculous; somebody ought to tell him that their virulent (and decidedly non-libertarian) opposition to abortion, for example, is anything but based on a principle of nonviolence. But I don’t expect an Australian holed up in an Ecuadoran embassy in the UK (and under indictment in Sweden) to be a master of domestic US politics. Really all Assange, or anyone, needs to know is that Wikileaks has been doing what establishment US media ought to do, but rarely does – provide some transparency as to exactly what our tax dollars are buying.
Watch the Australian Senate race for Assange’s aborigine policy to decide how totally aligned he is with the views of the Pauls.
But again my point is that Wikileaks is not delegitimized by who Assange the person chooses as political allies.
Where was the personal attack?
Hello?
Hello?
Beuller?
There is nothing that bears even the slightest relationship to a personal attack in my comment, although your decision to ignore what I wrote and accuse me of that certainly counts.
As does ‘your beloved Obama.’
Why the hell does this person have front page status? Look at this nonsense.
Did you even read the fucking link, Geov, before you threw your tantrum?
Since you didn’t: it’s the fucking Southern Poverty Law Center reporting on this melding of ideologies.
You know, that bastion of “personal attacks.”
I’m sure this a proud moment for you.
And just to clear up one niggling point: my beloved Obama administration has not called Assange a terrorist, accused him of terrorism, accused him of working for terrorists, associated him with terrorists, charged with any terrorist crimes, treated him like a terrorist, put his organization on any list of terrorists, or otherwise treated him as a terrorist in any way.
Serious answer from Andrew Levine in Libertarianism in the Age of Obama
Helpful analysis and on target. But not all libertarians are Tea Party folks; techies are different and only now with the privacy issue are they beginning to peel away from the Republican military state consensus.
Techies were always there on issues of privacy and of course drugs. They vote Republican because of taxes. They’re only being political about privacy now because it’s suddenly a Republican issue, and because the Snowden revelations reveal that rich white boys can be spied on. (Though in fact it’s no likelier than it ever was.)
You’re saying there’s a “rich white boy” block on NSA searches?
If they’re profiling rather than using network analysis–as the XKeyscore documents suggest, which is a big disappointment to me–then they’re using profiles that would tend to exclude your techie libertarians. You need to ask yourself what they’re looking for and how they frame the query. Within their own institutional culture. (And keeping in mind that FBI, a truly frightening agency, has no access to NSA stuff.)
I’m mindful that they do make colossal mistakes but I can’t think of why they would look inside of the mountains of data they collect unintentionally. For what? Sex tapes?
I would think that international transactions between folks who frequent 4chan or have network associations with Anonymous or LulzSec would be high on the list of monitored individuals. And three hops out would include quite a bunch of techie libertarians, who are not all rich white guys by the way.
I do ask myself what the NSA analysts are looking for and how they frame queries, because there are whistleblowers who are saying that it is out of hand. And Wyden and Udall are saying “it’s only the tip of the iceberg” that the public knows about NSA overreach.
And the Verizon FISA court order that was the first release in Glenn Greenwald’s series was issued on behalf of the FBI and the order ordered Verizon to deliver the information to the NSA. And NSA makes referrals to FBI using as-yet unknown criteria.
And we have a documented instance of NSA analysts monitoring calls between deployed soldiers and their significant others just for kicks. According to NSA, that issue has been fixed. But Snowden asserts that it is fixed only with policy and not with a technical auditing system. NSA disputes that. Which is why there needs to be an investigation.
It is only the assertion of NSA that they are following the law that says that the mountains of data are collected unintentionally.
And the PATRIOT Act had the effect of joining the NSA and the FBI at the hip. Because that supposedly was on the major failings that allowed 9/11 to happen. So if they are not joined at the hip for actual tracking of terrorists we are big trouble from and national security standpoint. And if they are and are overreaching we are in big trouble from a civil liberties standpoint.
You certainly know the material better than I do.
Having said that, I really think it could be completely appropriate for NSA to be following people who have dense communications with Anonymous or even the former LulzSec, cute as the latter was; asking NSA to have a sense of humor would be asking too much.
I was convinced that NSA and FBI are still unable to communicate during the Associated Press upheaval last spring, where the FBI had to serve AP with subpoenas to seize the phone records instead of just sucking them up through PRISM or whatever. If they’re legally prevented from doing it that’s good news. If they’re data systems aren’t up to NSA requirements that’s not surprising.
And I”m completely persuaded by the new story of NSA improprieties being caused by ineptitude rather than design, because that’s just how bureaucracies work. And because it’s so embarrassing: spy agencies would rather be caught murdering than being stupid, how could they be acknowledging it if it wasn’t the truth?
The Pentagon does have access to NSA data, and it was military officers, not NSA personnel, that spied on army sexytime conversations. For what it’s worth.
Seriously, I am truly concerned that the “left” or whatever it is is losing sight of the very real and pervasive oppression by profile of black and Latino people and Arabs/Muslims in favor of people like the libertarian who tweeted about “the NSA watching me pee.” No, they’re not all rich white boys (that one was a white girl, don’t know about her economic status), but they’re thinking from a standpoint of privilege and holding on to it.
My working hypothesis right now is that there is design at the top, corruption in the middle, and ineptitude among the contractors who are just selling a boondoggle. But that doesn’t mean that the overall system can’t be used for tyrannical purposes because it is overly broad in in its collection.
Indeed Ron Wyden asserted yesterday that NSA does not require section 215 (bulk collection) authority to do its job.
It just so happens that adding that capability sells lots of contracting hours, lots of servers, and potentially yottabytes of hard drives. With markups for the contractors who recommended it, the subcontractors who install, operate, and maintain it, and the vendors who provide the hardware and software.
What a country!
There should be all kinds of blocks on NSA searches. I don’t know that there are, of course, but access control is just basic in this kind of system.
This is why we can’t really know how sinister something like XKeyscore is just by looking at the interface. For instance, I saw some comment on the Justification field in the XKeyscore search form, which could very easily be used to block someone from conducting a search by checking the justification they enter against a list of accepted values. So you might get an error message saying your search isn’t justified. Again, I don’t know if this is what they’re doing, but it would be the proper way to set up this kind of system.
It’s also important to understand that this isn’t just for ethical reasons, they would have tight controls on their system for internal security as well. The more access you give someone, the more damage they can do.
A pick list can be defeated by lying about the purpose of the search. What is not clear is who drives the searches. Russ Tice’s description of how it worked over seven years ago was that he was handed a scrap of paper with a target phone number on it. He was not clear about where that phone number came from but claims that he searched records for the Congressional Armed Services and Intelligence committees, Supreme Court nominees, and one state senator then running for US Senate from Illinois. I would like a Congressional committee to ask him if he knew who authorized those searches.
I would suspect that there is tight controls on the databases themselves and reasonable controls on the GUIs accessing them. Snowden’s documents so far are the stuff that one would store on shared internal document servers.
These controls are not strict, apparently because one of the documents released by WaPo on Thursday was training on how to self-report violations of policy. It’s an interesting little matrix. One doesn’t need written policy on stuff that is enforced through the technology. That said, enforcing too much through technology is a pain in the ass for the user of the system and for productivity.
They’re all pro-German, anti-American. World War Two isn’t over.
Snark right?
They are all adherents of libertarian kookishness that a handful of liberals have embraced while simultaneously proclaiming themselves to be more principles than the liberals who don’t treat their libertarian kookishness as a charming personality quirk.
Assange:
Matt Drudge is a news media innovator and he took off about eight years ago in relation to the Monica Lewinsky scandal when he first became famous by publishing information that the establishment press in the United States would not.
Dammit, BooMan, stop smearing Julian Assange by associating him with Matt Drudge!
Are you saying that:
(1) Matt Drudge is not a media innovator?
(2) Matt Drudge did not rise to fame in relation to the Monica Lewinsky scandal?
(3) Matt Drudge did not print as it turns out true information that the establishment press in the United States would not?
Or are you saying that Wikileaks’s credibility is to be compared to that of Matt Drudge’s publication in which politically biased rumor prevails?
One is accurate. The other is a smear. Can you spot the difference?
Matt Drudge did not rise of prominence because the mainstream media was ignoring the Lewinsky scandal. Assange is ignorant, and making shit up.
Anyway, thank you for demonstrating so effectively my point about how you claim that associations Assange himself makes are unfair associations being made by his critics.
I could not have asked for better.
Assange is ignorant, and making shit up.
What shit is he making up?
That the mainstream media was ignoring the Lewinsky scandal, and that Druge rose to prominence by offering a useful corrective:
From the article: Matt Drudge is a news media innovator and he took off about eight years ago in relation to the Monica Lewinsky scandal when he first became famous by publishing information that the establishment press in the United States would not. It is as a result of the self censorship of the establishment press in the United States that gave Matt Drudge such a platform, and of course he should be applauded for breaking a lot of that censorship.
They will all be so humble and civil about our human rights until those same rights interfere with Corporate rights or ideas, then its screw human rights! Covertly of course.
They share an open-mouth policy of stop and start logic. I doubt Rand Paul ever tortured his father as a 3 year old with the “Why?” phase nor has Drudge bothered to laugh out loud at his own rumors. Assange just needs to get laid.
Assange tried getting laid. Didn’t work out well.
I’m amazed that nobody is noting Assange’s support for the Pauline view on abortion as part of a general ethic of “nonviolence”:
Penis libertarianism, not for girls. And I’m sorry, but Assange invites ad hominem remarks when he gets on this subject, given that he’s been accused of deliberately using a broken condom.
Which makes me all the more certain that he did in fact commit the crimes he is accused of.
Well, I didn’t want to go that far but yeah, it does bend one’s views in that direction.
Narcissistic Personality Disorder?
= political person recognized by media
Just more pronounced in the less smooth ones.
Easier to screen for elected officials who don’t have NPD. Or, to use the Jon Ronson formulation, most of our political and corporate leaders are psychopaths. Our system is a perfect environment for their success.
Their mothers were hampsters and their fathers smelled of elderberry?
For me, the main thing they have in common is that I don’t admire or respect any of them.
Although I guess the real question is whether these statements change my opinion of Julian Assange, in which case I would say they only add some minor and not terribly relevant details. And I would say the real question when it comes to Assange–as with Manning and Snowden and so on–is how you weigh the value of whatever service they’ve done against whatever destruction they have caused.
In that regard, I would just like to note that it’s been interesting to see what various people are willing to either accept or reject without evidence. For instance, if you suggest that Bradley Manning probably got some people killed, you may find yourself facing some very aggressive questioning–Who? Where? How? How do you know if was because of Bradley Manning?
And yet if you ask where all these people are who are being tyrannized by PRISM–not in the sense of having their metadata indexed, but in the sense of being harassed, locked up, tortured, or disappeared–Glenn Greenwald tells you we just know it’s happening because it must be happening because we know it is.
It’s all rather puzzling.
And yet if you ask where all these people are who are being tyrannized by PRISM–not in the sense of having their metadata indexed, but in the sense of being harassed, locked up, tortured, or disappeared–Glenn Greenwald tells you we just know it’s happening because it must be happening because we know it is.
You really don’t get it, do you? Did you hear just recently about how the CIA admitted it has long kept files on Chomsky? You obviously have no idea what the modern surveillance state is all about. And it’s really not about keeping us safe.
QED
You gotta admit, Noam Chomsky’s disappearance and torture were pretty awful.
As far as “getting it,” by the way, I’ve noticed that some of the people who are most convinced that they totally do get it have some basic misconceptions about the technology here. Thinking the NSA has yottabytes, for instance, is a basic failure of getting it, since nobody has yottabytes yet, and if the NSA did have yottabytes they wouldn’t be the only yottabytes out there.
Another thing that needs to be gotten is that China really is engaging in cyber-espionage on a massive scale whether the NSA is doing it or not, and they most definitely are not just fucking with their own people. I have yet to hear anyone explain what the US is supposed to do about Chinese cyber attacks unless our government has similar capabilities.
The important thing is to take each case on its own merits. The way the NSA operation has been run is a travesty and an embarrassment, but we need to be able to think clearly about what we do and don’t want our government to be able to do, and that needs to be based on a solid understanding of what’s actually going on.
And when was Noam Chomsky tortured, by the way?
Bruce Schneier has some ideas about defense against cyberattacks and it starts with tightening up the security of systems, something that cannot currently be done because of NSA/FBI requirements for law enforcement back doors into the system.
My perspective. The most cyber-vulnerable nation on the planet should not be conducting offensive cyberwarfare that takes out electric machinery through malware attacks and then pretend that they did not do it. And then have a general brag to a New York Times reporter that we did indeed do it. The StuxNet attack on Iranian uranium processing centrifuges looked minor at the time; now it looks huge.
My other insight is that it is stupid to allow government black hat contractors to sell off-the-shelf exploits to other customers.
Finally, don’t go to two conventions of security specialists in two years and lie to them about what your agency is up to if you want to get ideas from them.
And I see we’ve raised the bar on illegal surveillance. Now one has to be tortured for it to be illegitimate. What happened is that the CIA did not shut down their file on Noam Chomsky just because the Church Committee slapped their hands.
That they’ve been keeping a file on Chomsky is hardly a surprise. That they’re admitting it is absolutely astounding–this is serious progress going on before your eyes.
Snipe all you want, folks.
Parrot any and all of the (astoundingly various) PermaGov media anti-“libertarian” lines…as if anybody could accurately define “libertarianism.” It is still morphing, and damned rapidly I might add.
But mind this…it is a rapidly growing movement that has well outstripped being anything even barely controllable by old-line Birchers and KKK types.
It has entered the mainstream consciousness despite the best efforts of the media to brand it as just another group of Flakey Foonts (Robert Crumb’s helpless, tortured everyman.), and it is going to have a serious impact on the next two elections despite being panned and banned by the media and the ever-more-lame, so-called “progressive” leftinesses/”conservative” rightinesses.
Bet on it.
The collective failure of the rightiness left (Obama for one) and the leftiness right (McCain, etc.) to centrist itself out of the troubles that it allowed to descend on the U.S. during the Clinton/Bush II years…Clinton sicced the financial dogs on us all and Butch followed with with the military and snoop dogs…left a vacuum on both sides of the centrist rug. The real left and real right are now meeting in another room. They are debating which vacuums to occupy and how to do it. It’s gonna get…interesting.
Watch.
Someone who manages to connect the Occupy types with the small government types is going to have some real power, and foreign affairs is going to be the glue that holds those forces together.
Watch.
Any day now.
Aaaany day now…
The trap is closing, and…well, you know how them traps are.
They trap whatever is fooilsh enough to get caught in the center. Jackass donkeys and elefumps too.
Watch
AG
“Someone who manages to connect the Occupy types with the small government types is going to have some real power, and foreign affairs is going to be the glue that holds those forces together.”
There are major barriers that make this extraordinarily unlikely:
You are “wholly unconvinced that ‘foreign affairs’ would bind [those] movements,” eh?
There have been stranger bedfellows. I will bet you that if Ron Paul had gone into Zuccotti Perk or any of the other Occupy camps he would have gotten a damned good reception. His aims and the Occupy aims are very similar. A fair shake for all citizens and an end to economic imperialism. Both groups clearly see that it is the multinational corporate cancer that is the real enemy. That enemy must be stopped. All the rest of the talk? Tactical differences. Reduce big government power and you reduce the influence of corporate interests. Stop our militarist insanity and you hit them in the pocketbook. Hard. You say “The Occupy movement demands government action to increase regulation and decrease income inequality?” i didn’t see or hear much of that from the Occupy people…the ones on the ground, in the tents and on the kitchen lines.
Demand government action to increase regulation and decrease income inequality? That just sounds like the usual neoliberal bullshit to me. Regulation of what? The corporations? Shit…they own the current(ly) Permanent Government, centerfielddj. Why would they kill the goose that keeps on laying golden egg after golden egg for them? Please.
You say further that “Movements need organization?”
Ron Paul put together one hell of an organization in 2012. I firmly believe that there is a good chance the Republican Party will eventually be taken over by that organization…at the very least by many of those Paulist ideas, especially ceasing our role as world cop. Maybe not this year or next year, but before 2016. If the power of the PermaGov and its media weapons successfully stops that from happening then a new party will be formed, taking its energy and its membership from disaffected Republicans, Democrats and independents alike. A third party that managed to flank both existing parties and take their disaffecteds…especially if it reached out successfully to minorities…would be a formidable organization. I live on a daily basis in a totally integrated world…both as a New Yorker and as a jazz and latin musician…and let me tell you, most black and hispanic people are well aware of how jive the whole governmental system is. A party that suggested another route to real equality other than big government…big government that simply does not work well in the administration of any its programs, including those aimed at helping people who are in economic trouble…would resonate big time in the inner cities and also with the vast hispanic population now living in the heartland as well.
Watch.
The old two party dialogue has changed, centerfielddj .
It’s a trialogue now.
Watch.
AG
I’m not seeing the promised fusion that independent progressives keep pushing as the left-right coalition. Rank-and-file Paulistas don’t yet seem to be on the same page with civil liberties and foreign policy. Most of my acquaintance are still pushing a large military and corporate impunity.
In short, it ain’t happening in the electoral process yet and not likely for a few years, if ever.
My view might change if hundreds of Paulistas start showing up at the Wisconsin State Capitol to be arrested with the Solidarity Singers.
But for right now, they seem to be a minor cult within the Republican Party.
But among libertarians at the national level, the Cato Institute has weighed in strongly on the NSA issues and their writer Julian Sanchez has done some striking opinion pieces on the issue.
“Both groups clearly see that it is the multinational corporate cancer that is the real enemy. That enemy must be stopped. All the rest of the talk? Tactical differences.”
I don’t agree with this. Small-government people want to unshackle multinational corporations from any regulations at all; how does that square with your claim? The Paul movement, which I can now see is who you are highlighting as the “small-government types”, do want to strip corporations of much of their profits from taxpayer funds, but that is only a part of corporate abuse of the American public. The Paul movement is opposed to helping Americans in their battles against big businesses; they want to weaken and strip opposition to corporations in the private sphere, not stop them.
Then, there’s the other, even larger and more powerful chunk of the “small-government types”- the Tea Partiers. There is a bit of overlap of these two, I concede, but we can see that there are many Tea Partiers who are having bitter fights with Paul supporters over control of the GOP Party, particularly at the State and local levels. The Tea Party doesn’t share the same policy goals as the Paul movement, and are in direct opposition to them on foreign policy, the plank on which you wish to form a mass movement.
I’d also like to hear you articulate who or what has the power to see to it that multinational corporations are “stopped”. Feel free to criticize government intervention as “neoliberal bullshit,” but your statements here do not provide any plan at all to bring the multinationals down. What is your proposed movement’s alternative to the Executive, Legislative and Judiciary branches, and how would they successfully execute it?
Related to this, I found this claim of yours troublesome as well: “Reduce big government power and you reduce the influence of corporate interests.” The biggest relative growth of U.S. government power in the modern era was during the early years of FDR’s Administration. Big government can be used to “reduce the influence of corporate interests” just as it can increase their influence.
You claim that the Paul movement has put together one hell of an organization, and you see them poised to take over the Republican Party. Ron barely moved the needle in Presidential delegate and vote counts in 2008 and 2012, and Rand is not gaining major buy-in from the Senate Republicans for his legislative priorities. That said, I’m ready to be surprised by what a fractured GOP might do in its 2016 Presidential primaries. Taking over the GOP would not be a third party movement, though, and a Paul-led GOP would be viciously opposed by Occupiers in a number of policy areas.
What function you think the Federal Reserve serves, centerfielddj? You know…the Fed org that Ron Paul wants to eradicate and his son want at the very least to audit? is nothing less than the money laundering machine for criminal corporate America. Eliminate the money laundering banker(s) and the whole multinational criminal corporate scheme falls apart.
As far as the rest of your caveats are concerned…we shall see. I actually think that the current style of business as usual will continue until its ongoing depredations result in a total economic collapse of this country. This is by no means what I want, so I root for the opposition.
So it goes.
We are so at risk now that I would take almost any appreciable change as a plus.
You?
More business as usual.
We shall see.
It hasn’t worked out very well so far, this neoliberal “business as usual” bullshit. Extreme times call for extreme measures.
Time for a change.
AG
“Eliminate the money laundering banker(s) and the whole multinational criminal corporate scheme falls apart.” That’s incredibly reductive, and fails to appreciate a number of other common abuses of our systems by and for international corporations and against you, me, and our brothers and sisters. Many of these abuses would be enabled to grow and mutate under a Rand Paul administration, or anyone else implementing the Paul agenda. They’d even enable corporations to invent new methods of abuses.
But even more problematically, you lack a real plan; in fact, you appear to justify the lack of necessity for coming up with any outline of a realistic, achievable plan. The whole edifice might need to come down, you claim. That comes off as supremely reckless, even if you’re not rooting for it. Doesn’t sound like you think it would be the worst outcome.
Me, I’ll accept incremental progress as an alternative to all the dead and starving who would be victims of edifice destruction, particularly since there is no assurance at all that the next government would be an improvement on the status quo. In fact, history shows that the odds of that would be extremely low, human nature being as it is.
Can’t think of a successful movement which has been built without a reasonably comprehensive plan to win. “Eradicate/audit the Fed because we say so” will not be a major plank in building a movement, certainly not between the Occupiers and Paulites. Also, you’re no longer working within your previously identified foreign policy bridge-builder.
Oh right, and the rape charge. The fact that Julian Assange stands accused of rape in Sweden is irrelevant to the value of WikiLeaks, but it has brought shame on some of his acolytes. I saw an essay by I think Bruce Sterling in which the author characterized the rape charge as some kind of contretemps with Swedish feminists.
Now of course it’s possible that those dastardly Swedes set him up, and the whole thing where they want to prosecute him for rape, sexual molestation, and unlawful coercion is just a way to silence him. But, OK, yes, it does affect my opinion of Assange to know that this is the particular and immediate reason why he’s hiding in the Ecuadorian embassy. It does make his stand there feel somewhat less heroic.
I’m not thinking of the rape charge as such but the weird you-can’t-make-stuff-like-this-up detail of his compulsion to impregnate, e.g. by breaking condoms behind women’s backs, which really gives me the creeps in combination with his newly revealed admiration for the Pauls’ “libertarian” anti-abortion stance. No, it’s not about the value of WikiLeaks at all. Except to the extent that the Assange personality cult has been harmful to WikiLeaks, which could be considerable.
What do Julian Assange, Ron and Rand Paul, and Matt Drudge have in common?
They all know only part of a story and think they have the whole story.
it means some on the Professional Left are dupes.
their hero praises muthafuckas like Ron and Rand Paul.
they are so fucking gullible.
Interesting discussion 🙂 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mokoolapps.undertheseapuzzles