Paulie's Anti-Liberventionist Burden of Proof

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

Prospective Advertiser:

Thanks for again failing to quote a Bush lie per my rules above.   As for Taliban due process, I'm still waiting for one bystander to seriously claim that they're not sure which has a better record on that matter.  It's profoundly un-intellectual -- no wait, merely inane -- to claim one has to have been arrested to assess America's record on due process.

You've got my argument on Hiroshima wrong.  Wake me when you can correctly state it.  It remains unrebutted at http://blog.360.yahoo.com/knowinghumans?p=187.

I didn't say "noone expected unrest in Iraq". I said nobody expected the bloody civil war that the invasion unleashed.  I've extensively documented this failure of Iraq Cassandras at http://knowinghumans.net/2007/02/iraq-cassandras-no-they-did-not-tell-us.html.  I guarantee you cannot document the sort of prediction that I claim didn't happen.  I dare you to try.

U.S. supplied chemical weapons to Saddam?  I've annihilated this claim at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/message/1242.

Tom, thank you for recognizing that you haven't disagreed with my point about whether CF's antiwar coverage has been divisive.  I of course agree that merely supporting the current LP Platform isn't divisive. :-)

Paulie, if you can't see the difference between the American and Taliban records on due process, then I don't have time to waste showing it to you.  I'll gladly concede to you any reader who is similarly blind.  Meanwhile, your riposte about extraditing Tony Blair remains a misfire.

Similarly, I'm going to have to declare your complaints about the Taliban and 9/11 evidence as just too silly to spend any time on.  You know I love to debate, and I've written reams on 9/11 conspiracy silliness, so that should calibrate for you just how weak I think your argument is here.  The fact that some people have been slow to figure out who committed 9/11 is just not a serious argument that we shouldn't have deposed the Taliban.  Sorry.

Re: the unexpected civil war, see my Cassandras article above.  I've researched this intensively.  It wasn't predicted.  Sorry.  Also, note that if an Iraq civil war was inevitable whenever the reign of Saddam and his sons ended, then the current civil war isn't much of a good argument that invading Iraq was a mistake.

You're the one saying some or all of Saddam's genocides were U.S. responsibility.  You tell ME which ones you mean.

April Glaspie?  See http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/message/885.  Downing Street Memo?  See http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/message/1241.  A dozen other links are at http://more.libertarianintelligence.com/2009/01/paulie-wants-to-debate-iraq-and-waco.html.  Yes, I know reasonable libertarians disagree with me.  I'm not the one here claiming that no reasonable libertarian disagreement is possible.  If that's your position, then you have to deal with everything I cite, while I don't have to answer anything but rebuttals to what I've specifically cited.  That's what you get for assuming such a high burden of proof.

And if instead you're going to drop all the empirical arguments and fall back on the anarcholibertarian complaint against the defense of liberty as a tax-financed public good, then I again claim that reasonable libertarians can disagree.  Are you now going to say that minarchists aren't reasonable libertarians simply because they don't always want the defense of liberty to stop at lines drawn onto maps by statists?

Nice try regarding Koresh, but I was serious when I said I won't debate Waco.  Might as well ask me about Area 51.

Regarding Bush lies to get into Iraq, I stated the rules clearly above.  Pick your best quote and put it between quotation marks.  I'll give you one shot.  Make it count.

I need to fix the California newsletter before I can worry about LP News.  Between LPCA ExCom, my new water board seat, and another round of PlatCom, my activism plate is pretty full right now.

Jeff, I agree that continuing the military effort in Iraq is a mistake.  That's been my position since 2006.  As far as I can tell, none of your criticisms apply to the position I set forth in http://knowinghumans.net/2007/04/defending-libervention-in-iraq.html.

I agree that talk of "vital interests" is ill-advised and unnecessary.  I never talk of "vital interests", only about defending human liberty.

LG, reasonable radicals like Tom and Paulie and you do a good enough job already of keeping me on my toes, so please don't go discouraging radical punching bags like Prospective Advertiser.  My plans for the LP depend on radicals being unreasonable, dammit. :-)