And your argument is that it’s morally acceptable to deliberately kill someone, with premeditation, on the basis of the bare “potential” for the “loss of more lives.”

There’s a potential that you could find me and kill me in my sleep. Does that give me the right to slit your throat in order to “guarantee” that you won’t?

“Even though I am still unsure of my feeling towards the death penalty, it is the law and he definitely qualifies.”

Oh, well, if it’s the law there can’t possibly be any ethical qualms about its enforcement or any reasons to think it should be changed or ameliorated or suspended when somebody’s life is at stake.

Thanks for clearing that one up.

thickvixen: “There is no perfect system in this world. But your response is to not have the system at all.”

If a “system” is costly, useless, and kills innocent people, then usually not having the “system” at all is a good idea.

Of course you could make an argument that the premeditated slaughter of criminals is not useless, and that it has benefits that are worth the costs, and even worth murdering innocent people. But you certainly haven’t made that argument yet.

(Incidentally, you can put the kibosh right now on any of your stock responses about auto accidents or airplane crashes or whatever the hell it is you’ll go on about next. I assume that you’re old enough to understand the difference between accidental death and premeditated intentional killing.)

Speaking as an economist, do you seriously believe that government economic planners can calculate more efficient allocation of land resources than consensual market bids in a system of private land ownership? If so, why?

If you’re gonna make an omelet, ya gotta break a couple eggs. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

Cluster bombs don’t just leave a bit of a mess around the kitchen. This is not some limited set of easily fixable costs we are talking about. People are dying, needlessly; conservative estimates place the number around 10,000-15,000 Iraqi civilians and some peer-reviewed results place it around 100,000. If you want to say that these innocent people’s lives are worth whatever the hell it is you hoped to accomplish, then say so, but at least have enough respect for the dead not to pass off their deaths with facile proverbs.

“Suicide bombings”, of course, are not the issue. The issue is bombings that target civilians (would it be better if they were dropping the bombs from planes?)

Ben gave his view. I happen to disagree strongly with him about the targeting of settlers, but I don’t see any reason to think that he is being disingenuous about his position. Do you? If so, what is it?

Oh sure. Once Arabs murder someone, there will be always a lot of people who will say “well, actually Jews organised that”. There’s a lot of nutjobs out there, and some of them happen to hate Jews and Israel. You are not alone.

Frodo, do you know anything in particular about how the Sabra and Chatila massacres occurred? This isn’t just some bullshit conspiracy theory about ZOG or Mossad. It’s a simple fact about how it was that Phalangist militias came to be in the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps, and how it came to be that Palestinian refugees could not get out once the slaughter began. It’s not very complicated: the Israeli military surrounded Sabra and Chatila with tanks, and then asked the Christian Phalange militias to pass through the encirclement in order to “restore order” and “liquidate” the mythical “terrorists” in the camps (which were populated by unarmed women, children, and old men after the PLO withdrew to Tunisia). The Phalange at the time was smarting for revenge for the assassination of Bashir Gemayel. What did they think the Phalange was going to do? Deliver cookies?

Numerous Israeli military officers have said that they could see what was happening in the camps, and told their commanders, and told Sharon, but that they would not do anything to stop it. After the massacre, over 400,000 Jews in Israel rallied in protest and denounced then-Defense Minister Ariel Sharon as a murderer. All raving anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists, I’m sure. Or perhaps not.

Save your complaints about “hating Israel.” The issue here is not who lives in Israel or what it is. The issue is that atrocities like Sabra and Chatila are completely indefensible. That would be true, no matter who committed them.

Just who do you think is safer as a result of Mr. Bush’s war? Ordinary Americans? Ordinary Iraqis? Har har har.

So by the most conservative estimates at least 10,000 Iraqi civilians are dead. Mr. Bush made the decisions that killed them. For what? Liberty? Safety? Ooops—well, I guess nobody’s perfect.

‘I don’t understand what you are talking about. British politics have nothing to do with American politics.’

This would come as a surprise to Russell Kirk, who explicitly drew from the work of British conservatives such as Edmund Burke. American conservative thought and practice has always been directly linked with English conservatism. It would be downright foolish not to understand the connections between Tory thought in the wake of the French Revolution—including, in particular, their critique of univeralist ideology and reconstructive politics (in both cases, their main target was the classical liberals, who they blamed for the Revolution). American conservatives have certainly made no bones about these connections.

‘Neo-conservatives aren’t part of the American “Conservative Tradition;”’

Is there any particular reason for saying this other than the fact that you don’t like them? Anarchists typically loathe the fact that Marxist-Leninist butchers are also part of the socialist tradition, even though they were, comparatively, Johnny-come-latelies who mangled a huge amount of the tradition to serve their own bloody-minded ends. But few would deny that the Marxist-Leninists were, in fact, part of the socialist tradition.

“Look up Bill Buckley on lewrockwell.com, and you’ll find out exactly what it meant to be a conservative before the neo-cons showed up. Not because Buckley is one, but because he, more than any other person, fucked it all up. Also, conservatives (circa 1930’s-1940’s) were traditionally not widely associated with any social regulation, merely economic issues.”

I’m well aware of Rothbard’s broadsides against Buckley. You may notice that the Commonweal quote from Buckley that I linked is one commonly cited by Rothbard. And pretty much everything that can be said against Buckley is well-deserved.

But I can’t agree with the notion that there was anything of value in the conservative tradition to be fucked up when Buckley reached the scene. This, for example, is simply not true: “conservatives (circa 1930’s-1940’s) were traditionally not widely associated with any social regulation, merely economic issues.” In fact, American conservatives during the 1930s and 1940s routinely embraced militant white supremacy—especially in the South. The Old Right that LewRockwell.com fawns over included many very honorable people with good reasons for opposing interventionist warfare—but also an unfortunate number of anti-Semites and admirers of fascism. (Charles Lindbergh and Father Coughlin are not to be praised for their anti-interventionism: they only opposed intervention because they were fond of the Nazi terror-empire.)

Neo-conservatism is Prussian authoritarianism combined with rampaging Trotskyist globalism. That sucks; but paleoconservatism, with its legacy of social authoritarianism, (sometimes) economic protectionism and welfare populism, and (always) xenophobia and militant racism is not an improvement. Both of them are ugly movements that trace important parts of their influence to ugly forebearers in British conservatism, the French Right, and the Kaiser’s Prussia. The conservative tradition is not worth saving. If you want to find a tradition to reclaim from statism, it is anti-state liberalism that you should look into. (Generally speaking: the dude who wears the Crown is a less reliable libertarian than the dudes who are chopping that crowned head off.)

“I’d say that most all libertarians are conservative (in the real sense of the word, at least)!”

No they’re not. Conservatism as an explicit tradition of political thought began in Britain in direct opposition to classical liberalism. Its purpose was to defend the authority of the Crown in the wake of the French Revolution, its content was a rejection of “abstract” demands for universal liberty, and its means were brute force.

The conservative tradition is not something worth your labors. Toss the rotten thing out.