The good news from the Libertarian Party National Convention in Denver this past weekend was, Big Head Press sold a big pile of books. Also, my friend L. Neil Smith got to meet up with a dozen or so friends he hasn’t seen in years, and I got to hang with some great people who had been “Internet friends” till now, and meet many interesting new friends.

The bad news is, well, already pretty widely known. Bob Barr has the LP Presidential Nomination, and his buddy Richard Viguerie at long last can add the LP national mailing list to his collection. Actual Libertarian Steve Kubby went down in flames, although the other Actual Libertarian, Dr. Mary Ruwart, ran a strong second in the voting. If 50 delegates had voted the other way on that 6th ballot, the outcome would have been very different.

The question now is, should we care?

Back in the 1970s, when I joined the libertarian movement, the operating definition of “libertarian” pretty much boiled down to as follows:

A libertarian is someone who believes that no one has the right, under any circumstances, to initiate* force or fraud against another person, nor may one delegate to or incite others to do the same.

* — to “initiate force” means to be the first to introduce coercion into a situation, either by violence or threat of violence. Defensive
force is justified, and retaliatory force may be justified depending on the circumstances.

This is the “non-aggression principle,” which coupled with the Lockean definition of property rights, is the core of libertarianism, and the basis for an ethical system that the Libertarian Party was founded in order to propagate and _eventually_ establish in public policy.

There are, to be sure, some difficult questions — such as abortion, or pacifism, or engagement in electoral politics — about which reasonable
libertarians may disagree. But advocating taxation, or legal discrimination against people with unpopular lifestyles, or prohibiting
any peaceful activity, are clearly against libertarian principles.

One result of this move to form a political party was that, as the most visible movement vehicle, whatever the Party does has come to define what “libertarian” means to most people. What Rothbard wrote, or what core libertarian activists wrote into the original party platforms, matters little compared to what that guy in the tie on the idiot box exclaims.

So with the nomination of Barr, the word “libertarian” will cease to describe a unique ethical and political philosophy, but simply indicate a kind of low-tax conservatism. And the Libertarian Party will now become a dumping ground for other failed Republicans. And it still won’t be able to win elections except in some local offices in low-population towns and counties, and when these “neo-libertarians” gain office, they will act just like Republicans, because the requirements of political power will easily overwhelm whatever weakened principles they may have and drive them tax, borrow, and spend just as politicians always have.

As a complement to the pragmatist triumph of Barr was the completion of the gut-the-Platform project begun in the off-year convention held in Portland in 2006. Replacing the formerly clear and deep explication of libertarianism of previous platforms is a series of TV-friendly sound-bites that are, for the most part, so vague as to render the Platform useless as the educational tool it was once intended to be.

Now, I fully expected something like this to happen, sooner or later. As I explained when I quit the Party eight years ago, the formation of a political party seemed like a good idea at the time but turned out to be a major strategic error. The founders did not expect to win elections in the short term, but thought the Party could be an educational vehicle, by attracting free media attention during election seasons when people are most inclined to think about politics.

However, electoral politics, with a few exceptions, has proved a very poor means of educating people. While it has found some success in bringing together and mobilizing people who are already inclined to cherish liberty, most of what educating has been done has happened outside the Party. (Mostly by authors such as Ayn Rand, Robert Heinlein, R.A. Wilson and L. Neil Smith writing compelling stories with strong libertarian themes, and by academicians making the case for liberty in economics, history, game theory, and so forth.) The public cannot be educated with bumper-sticker slogans and the short sound-bites that get through the media filters during election campaigns. Most Party energy is taken up with satisfying ballot access requirements and the various nuts-and-bolts requirements of campaigning — canvassing, making signs, mailing out flyers, organizing campaign events.

What little “internal” education has been attempted has run up against people who feel they already know the score and resent being told they need educating. They are mostly people with opinions only slightly removed from the mainstream, who are just looking for a vehicle to achieve power and enact their agendas. They don’t understand what libertarianism really means and they don’t want to understand, they just want to get elected.

And so while ballot access drives and lawsuits have chewed up activist money and resources, so have the continuing factional struggles between the “pragmatists” and the “purists” consumed much of our energy. And over the last two decades, many of the “purists,” myself included, have walked away from this useless fight, and now have left the Party in the hands of the Republicanoids.

As I said I knew this was going to happen, and it is a painful but necessary step towards fixing the problem that was created when the Party was founded in 1971.

The danger we face now is that the ideals of libertarianism will be polluted and twisted just as was the formerly honorable term and tradition of “liberalism,” at the hands of the progressive/socialists of a century ago. But this can be avoided.

The solution to this problem is to get the Party to give up the name “Libertarian.” I think this can be done via a two-pronged approach: 1) Those of us outside the Party but retaining soap-box power must make abundantly clear what libertarianism really is, and constantly harangue the Party for its failure to live up to that; 2) Those radical stalwarts remaining in the Party must make themselves such an enormous pain-in-the-ass that the leadership will gladly change the Party name if it will get rid of them.

Once the erstwhile Libertarian Party becomes the Fair-Tax Party or Conservatoid Party or whatever they end up calling themselves, we will have saved our “brand” and can apply it to something better — a membership-based advocacy group modeled on the Sierra Club, or something like it, which can be as successful in spreading the ideals of liberty as the SC has been spreading the ideals of environmentalism.

And we can focus on the important task at hand, and spend a great deal less time and money jumping through the government hoops designed to enervate and defeat us.

The LP National Convention is coming up next weekend, and of course I’m behind on much of what I need done for this event, where I’ll be exhibiting for Big Head Press in our shiny booth.

I’ve got the stand-up banners, the books should get here just in time, got the hotel rooms reserved. Don’t have funds secured yet for expenses, and don’t have my mini-comics project done. (The Last Sunovabitch of Klepton, which had a run in The Libertarian Enterprise, is getting printed in pamphlet form and amina sell these puppies.)

Which is why this entry is short and sweet. I gotta get back to work.

Well, on this blog anyway.
When Bre’r Frank moved things to a new server, for some reason the old spam-filter stopped working, and I was deluged by spam comments. I mean, deluged. The final count was 60,554 spam messages, accumulated over about three months.
So I turned comments off on most of the posts that were getting them, and pretty much avoided this blog since, well, since a little while after the Ron Paul post. I did post a mention about my new Twitter activity recently. (If you want to follow me, I’m at http://twitter.com/ScottBieser)

Well, we got a spiffy new anti-spam filter now, and I’m back, and plan to be more active here again (yeah, yeah, I’ve said that before). I had Frank purge the 60,000 spams too — we might have also purged a few genuine comments in the process, and if one of them was yours, sorry about that. But the data-set was too ginormous to spend time going through 20 records at a time to carefully sort out.

Onward!

I’m using Twitter now. “Follow” me if you care to receive random yammerings from me.

Easier then setting up a “Yammering-asshole.com” blog site.

I’ve been neglecting my blog for some time, and last week I spent several hours drafting a long, nuanced, examination of Paul’s career, my own history with Paul, and the racists under the bed of the libertarian movement. Then I screwed up and lost the damn thing. Fucking WordPress editor. Which is probably not that great a loss because few people would have the patience to read the whole thing anyway.

So, here’s the short version of my take on Ron Paul.

I don’t think he’s really any more of a racist than any of the other GOP contenders, or for that matter any of the Democrats. Including Obama. He has, however, pandered to racists in the past as a matter of political pragmatism in his South Texas Congressional district, and has racists among his friends and advisors. This is what is biting him in the ass now.

I chuckle at the phrase, “Ron Paul doesn’t have a racist bone in his body.” How can a bone be racist? Only minds can be racist. It would make more sense to say, “Ron Paul doesn’t have a racist neuron in his brain.” Which may be true.

In fairness, I should point out that Ron Paul opposes the drug war, and if he could end that, he’d liberate more black people than any President since Abraham Lincoln. If he could end the Iraq War quickly, he’d save even more black lives.

Is Ron Paul a homophobe? That’s harder to deny, since he did sponsor that bill which would prevent Federal courts from reviewing and possibly nullifying state laws against sodomy. I could write this off as simply pandering. A few years back he did join a gay-bashing Christian church. I don’t really know, and I don’t think anyone else does, either.

Is Ron Paul a libertarian? Wendy McElroy says he’s not, he’s a conservative with libertarian economic views. But what does Ron say about himself?
weiter lesen…

Yes I’ve completely neglected this blog for the past four months — I plead being insanely busy, occasionally depressed, and frequently distracted. I’ll try to do better.

Feeling a bit better this month…

Yesterday I drove the 80 miles down to Boulder, Colorado to Time Warp Comics and Games, for the purpose of meeting my friends Batton Lash and Jackie Estrada, who live in San Diego but were in the Greater Martian Neighborhood to do a signing. Batton is the cartoonist who writes, draws, and self-publishes the Supernatural Law series of comics. Batton’s books are generally light-hearted, comedic, and definitely “old school” but always an enjoyable read. (The stories’ premise is that vampires, ghosts, werewolves, etc. have legal problems, same as everybody else, and two New York attorneys specialize in representing them.)

Anyway, one of them ratted me out to Wayne Winsett, the store owner, so I was able to get fifty bucks worth of comics goodness in trade for some of the Big Head Press books I always carry in the cargo bay of my spaceship. I picked up issues 2 and 3 of Black Summer, Volume 2 of Persepolis, and Paul Pope’s 100%, along with several back issues of Radioactive Man, which Batton also writes for Bongo. Those last were gifted to Son the Younger to help stimulate his reading habits. We also agreed that when Roswell, Texas makes its in-print debut next year that I will do a signing there (along with Neil Smith if I can drag his ass down there).

(Speaking of public appearances, I’m going to be at Majesticon in Denver on Oct. 28, hopefully also with Neil.) Just in case anyone here lives close enough to Denver and wants to come see me.)

The other reason I’m feeling better is that Wife the Ex is taking Son the Elder on a trip this week to the Republic of Texas, and will be visiting my parents there. My mom, who is the greatest mom in the galaxy, is especially dear to both Son the Elder and Wife the Ex, because after Wife the Ex split from me, and her shack-up relationship with Jackass the Homewrecker fell apart, my Mom was the only one able and willing to take them in. They lived together for almost four years, and the Ex now thinks my Mom is her Mom, too. Oh, well, I don’t mind sharing, just so that Son the Elder gets to see his favorite Grandma — he simply adores her, and she’s in her 80s now and it’s really hard to tell how many more visits will be possible before she joins the Choir Invisible.

So it’s all good.

It’s been brought to my attention that my old domain name, “Libertyartworx,” which I abandoned in 2003, has been bought by some company of assholes who point it to one of those sites that promises to “scan your computer for spyware” and proceeds to load your system full of trojans and other crap if you’re naiive enough to let them “scan” you. Or actually, “scam” you.

This is unfortunate because a lot of old links to my cartoon work floating around the Web contain the old, obsolete “libertyartworx.com” URLs and I don’t want people looking for my stuff to be finding that stuff instead.

So please, spread the word around your favorite forums, when the topic of my work comes up, that all links to my on-line artwork are either at scottbieser.com, my on-line gallery, or bigheadpress.com, my publisher. Libertyartworx.com is not mine anymore and goes to a scam site. Thank you.

Ron Paul had some of his best moments yet, at the South Carolina GOP debatable, brought to us by MiniTrue. If you haven’t seen the performance, check it out here.

Naturally, the MiniTrue spin-doctors are twisting Ron’s remarks and calling him nasty names and darkly demanding to cut him off from the Republican debates. On the “other” networks, the talking suits don’t seem to want to acknowledge Paul’s existence. An anti-War Republican? That Does Not Compute. They just don’t know how to deal with it.

Anyway, it’s been a long time since I’ve drawn a political ‘toon and I don’t think I’ve ever drawn one involving Ron, so here goes, in honor of Ron’s Great Shout Into The Void, my contribution to the circus.

I’m opening up rights on this one to free distribution, providing the image is not altered other than for re-sizing.

Today I read a strange tale of a part-time web-cartoonist who lost his day-job just for talking about a .22 bolt-action rifle he was considering purchasing, while at work. As strange stories go, it’s fairly straightforward, and perhaps best summarized on the blog of yet another web-cartoonist, Robert Stevens:

Matt was working as a contractor for a branch of the government. He made the mistake of being interested in the hobby of paper target shooting at about the same time as the VA Tech shootings and talking to someone about this hobby at work. Keep in mind he wasn’t even talking about those shootings, in fact he was discussing how he wanted a gun which would make it difficult to kill someone.

He was promptly fired and not allowed back to work because people were scared of him.

To top it all off, he was later visited by police detectives for making a comic about his experience, because it was a “borderline terroristic threat.” (Is “terroristic” even a word? Did they get that from the Colbert report?)

The web-comic in question, Three Panel Soul, is not your typical web-comic. It is well-drawn, and usually funny, often quite funny. It is produced by Ian McConville and Matt Boyd, (I’m not certain but I think it’s Matt who writes and Ian who draws). But it’s a worthy addition to your RSS feed if you have one of those. The sequence involving the gun-interest starts here.

I have mixed feelings about this situation. The anarchist in me notes that Matt (I think he’s the one who was fired) was working for a major government contractor. So part of me feels, “serves you right working for the dark side.” On the other hand, I often miss having regular paychecks myself, and I can sympathize with just about anyone less morally compromised than, say, Condoleeza Rice, who loses a job due to a situation as stupid as this one.

It doesn’t help that Matt has since offered an apology not only for his remarks at his job but for penning and posting cartoons about what happened. In his rant box for May 3 we find this:

For anyone offended by this sequence of comics, I apologize. I don’t want to hurt people. I just wanted to write about what happened to me, and I did it in comics, because writing comics is what I do. I don’t want to make light of the VT shootings and my problems pale in comparison.

Well sure, getting fired is a lot less tragic than getting dead, but to my thinking Matt is not the one who should be apologizing. Whether he wrote this because the visit from the cops intimidated him, or because he really feels bad, or because he hopes he can placate and cajole his former masters into taking him back, only he can know.

What strikes me as most remarkable about this story is that there are so many people in this country who react the way Matt’s ex-co-worker(s) did. Anyone who talks of even thinking about buying a low-powered, single-shot firearm suddenly becomes A Menace To All Around Him.

I’m not the first to notice this, but we have developed in this country a Culture of Harmlessness which demands that everyone not presumably constrained by some command-and-control structure — that is, everyone not either a cop or a soldier — must render himself completely harmless and stay that way in order to be socially acceptable. Which makes things all cherries for cops and soldiers, and the plutocrats who command them, but it should be anathema to a free people.

Self-defense — which for practical reasons requires that one not be harmless — is as important and basic a bodily function as eating, breathing, and sleeping. Once we’ve forsaken not only the physical ability but also the mental capacity for using violence when necessary to defend our lives and our liberty, then we become something less than human. First we become slaves, and eventually we become extinct.

Matt Boyd, it turns out, is hardly a square-shouldered hero for gun rights. He is a part of this Culture of Harmlessness who, for a short time, showed just a bit of curiosity and interest in paper-target shooting. And got smacked down hard for it. Now he’s showing us his belly in the hope that he won’t get beaten further.

For his sake I hope this tactic doesn’t just bring more beatings.

I’m not generally a fan of World Net Daily, as it has become a cheerleader for our illegal and murderous war in Iraq. However, today it presented a wonderful little story about guns and crime that make a suitable coda for my previous remarks on this topic.

Anyone who reads this, and who actually looks at studies involving civilian self-defense against criminal attacks, and still wants to take away our guns, is just not arguing from reason. They are attacking a symbol, and all the cultural prejudices attached thereto, rather than real guns and real people in the real world.

Sort of like when conservatives insist we need to keep marijuana illegal.