Klunking Heads Together Over Libervention

http://www.independentpoliticalreport.com/2009/01/thomas-sipos-on-angela-keaton-and-ron-paul

Paulie, my very point was that I'm not trying to get liberventionism into the Platform.  You're going to have to specify your counterfactual a little more than with just your talk of shoes and feet if you want me to evaluate it.  Maybe as an anarchist you don't see any difference between the U.S. government and the Taliban in terms of respect for due process, but I do, and I respect your intelligence too much to explain that difference to you.  If it's any help, here's my evaluation of a related counterfactual: "The idiotic thing that Ron Paul said was the moral relativism implicit in his question about how would we like it if China did to us what we did to Iraq. If China had America's track record of promoting and defending liberty, and came here to snap the neck of a genocidal tyrannical George Bush who had used chemical weapons to exterminate entire towns of American dissidents, then I would welcome the Chinese Army with open arms, and might even tear down a statue of Bush to smack it with the sole of my shoe."

Volvoice, I can refute your "never" with a single word: Kurdistan.  But just for fun I'll add some more: England, Italy, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Holland, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Greece, Germany, Austria, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Grenada, Panama, Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo.

Prospective Advertiser, you just won a (losing) ticket to a game I've been playing on anti-liberventionists for years now. The rules of the game are this:

1. Type a quotation mark. (It's on the right side of your keyboard somewhere.)
2. Cut and paste an official White House statement made before the invasion arguing for it.
3. Type another quotation mark.
4. Give evidence that the statement was false. (Not merely misleading or exaggerated or incomplete or imprecise, but that its grammatical negation was true.)
5. Give evidence that Bush KNEW the statement was false.

I've never seen anyone come close to meeting this challenge.  Care to try?  Bush certainly misled and exaggerated and spun etc., but Bush had no need to use a demonstrable lie to get us into Iraq, and as far as I've been able to tell, he didn't.  (The "lie" issue is also a red herring.  My argument above for deposing Saddam involves no lies. If you want to argue against libervention in Iraq, you have to confront the best arguments for it.)

Your "swim in blood" comment is typical of the mental gymnastics that are required by anti-liberventionists to rationalize why principled libertarians disagree with them on this topic.  If you had an ounce of introspection this would be obvious to you, but you obviously have other psychological needs that you are driven to fulfill.

Tom, you are utterly failing to address my point that various positions have wildly different amounts of LP-internal dissent about them.  If Sipos were filling CF with articles defending free speech rights -- about which few if any Libertarians have any serious disagreements -- then I'd agree with you that he wasn't being divisive.  If instead he were focusing every month on abortion rights, you'd simply be addled to claim he wasn't being divisive.  I contend that intervention is much closer on the LP-divisiveness spectrum to abortion rights than it is to speech rights.  You might (desperately) try to disagree and keep a straight face, but it's just silly to deny (as you seem to) that the spectrum even exists.