Category Archives: Libertarian

Screenshot via ZodiacThe Washington Post's Alyssa Rosenberg notes that David Fincher's Zodiac was released 10 years ago. The film received rave reviews, but still seems underappreciated by the general public. In her retrospective, Rosenberg notes that Zodiacwhich chronicles the efforts of police officers and journalists to catch a real-life serial killer in the 1960s and 70sstill resonates:

The characters have resources to pursue their investigations, and they're given time and plenty of leeway by their superiors (though one local politician runs for governor on the argument that the cops didn't have what they needed to crack the case). And neither is "Zodiac" a story about the sorts of failures involved in the Vietnam War, where brilliant people, restricted both by their own faith in technocratic solutions and their fears of being seen as soft on Communism, made fatally terrible decisions.

Instead, Fincher captures the uncertainty and loss of confidence that follow from a prolonged failure by institutions and people who are doing everything they're supposed to, only to find that it doesn't produce the correct results.

Ten years after "Zodiac" was released, and almost fifty years after the July 4 killing that sets the movie in motion, we're still living with and working through the consequences of the decline and loss of faith David Fincher captured in this masterful film. Fincher's "Fight Club" offered up a vision of weaponized male turned against society as a whole, while his "Gone Girl" portrayed female anger that had been distilled into a particularly venomous domestic poison. "Zodiac" is his movie for the rest of us, who have to live in a world going slowly insane without losing ourselves.

For me, Zodiac was a story about obsessionwhat it feels like to care about something that most other people have lost interest in. The serial killerwho calls himself the Zodiac and sends cryptic messages to the authoritiesslaughters a handful of people, and then largely retreats into the shadows. He botches some of his attacks, and others don't fit his profile, calling into question whether he's a single person or a group of completely unrelated nutcases taking advantage of a momentary spotlight.

As days become weeks and even years, everybody moves on, except the police officers assigned to the case and the newspaper cartoonist who can't let it go. They're driven, not by public safetyas one character points out, more people die crossing the street than at the hands of the Zodiac killerbut by their own insatiable, personal need to solve the case. Asked why he still cares about a serial killer who has long since fallen inactive, Jake Gyllenhaal's character snaps, "I need to know who he is!" Anyone who's ever attempted a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle, but misplaced the last few pieces, will relate.

Zodiac also makes some lightly libertarian criticisms of authorityin particular, its limits. The various representatives of the institutions that fail to capture the killerthe police, newspapers, local politiciansaren't evil, or incompetent. They're decent people trying to do right by the citizens of California. But they encounter structural problems: the crimes cross city and county lines, and no single entity has all the relevant information. In an early scene, the lead detectives ask a county official to make copies of the evidence in his possession and fax it to San Francisco PD. He replies, "We don't have telefax yet."

The film also explores the notion that violence is random, and its underlying causes don't fit neatly into preconceived narratives. The Zodiac killer isn't Hannibal Lecter, or Ramsay Bolton. He's a weird loner whose actions don't reflect a discernible ideology of evil. This kind of real-world violence is the hardest to address through public policy, because there's no identifiable reason for it.

In the end, it took someone outside the law enforcement bureaucracyGyllenhaal's character, cartoonist Robert Graysmithto finally solve the case, to the extent that it's solved at all.

Original post:

Zodiac Turns 10: Why This Amazing Film Is Libertarian - Reason (blog)

The UN has determined that both the rebels and the opposition from Syrian and Russian forces had committed war crimes that have caused many casualties among the civilian population of Aleppo.

The investigation report released by the UN Commission of Inquiry noted that Syrian and Russian forcespervasively used weapons to bomb highly populated areas in the rebel-held capital of Aleppo during last years conflict.

According to Al Jazeerathesemunitions included aerial bombs, air-to-surface rockets, cluster munitions, incendiary bombs, barrel bombs, and weapons delivering toxic industrial chemicals.

The Syrian governmentalso used chlorine bombs, a banned chemically toxic weapon that caused hundreds of civilian casualties according to the UN report.The government has repeatedly denied using chemical weapons in the war, which has killedalmost 400,000 people.

The report also accused the Syrian government of ameticulously planned and ruthlessly carried out air strike on a UN and Syrian Red Crescent convoy in western Aleppo in September, which killed14 aid workers.

According toAl Jazeeras Mohammed Jamjoom, the press was told was that the UN is preparing a dossier so if there is a tribunal that eventually happens, the evidence is ready to try to prosecute those who are accused of doing war crimes.

Rebels have been accused of firing shells indiscriminately at government-held areas and other parts of western Aleppo. Rebels also reportedly prevented groups of civilians from escaping eastern Aleppo during the latter stages of its fall, and used some civilians as human shields.

The Syrian government has repeatedly deniedmost of the claims put forth against it, and the rebels have also failed to take any accountability for their actions. Both sides have ravaged the city of Aleppo, killed many innocent civilians, and have used inhumane and illegal methods in fighting each other.

Photo Credit: Reuters/Kenan Al-Derani

This post was written by Nicholas Amato.

The views expressed here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect our views and opinions.

Nicholas Amato is the News Editor at Being Libertarian. Hes an undergraduate student at San Jose State University, majoring in political science and minoring in journalism.

Like Loading...

Go here to read the rest:

UN: All Sides Committed War Crimes in Aleppo - Being Libertarian

Image courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons

With the victory of Betsy DeVos, it seems the Department of Education may be entering its end-of-life phase. Although I would thoroughly enjoy finishing it off with a few blows of a hammer (then poking it to ensure it is good and dead), the narrowness of her victory margin suggests that detractors will successfully petition to keep the department on life support for some time. Even though the mere existence of a Department of Education flies in the face of the Constitution, people have gotten rather used to it: kind of like the awkward office Christmas parties that everybody dreads but cant abandon because they are considered an integral part of polite society. Right below muh roads in importance is muh public schools. Publications like the New Republic seem to look at Ron Pauls revolutionary idea of public school abolishment as a sure symptom of severe mental illness (reason alone for me to strongly consider his stance).

I have both hope and misgivings about the appointment of DeVos, but I find the clear disdain for her, exhibited by some of my least-favorite talking heads, mildly encouraging. I am, at the very least, interested to see what she will do, and I hope that one of her first orders of system dismantling is to staunch the bleeding of tax dollars into higher education.

From a pragmatic perspective, this move is clearly a simpler one than some of her other endeavors will likely be. The people attending college are adults and (one would hope) better able to handle the removal of their babysitter. But the reason for its importance goes beyond mere convenience. Higher education and more specifically the governments funding of it lies at the crux of many of our most pressing problems in the United States.

Until recently, I would likely have promoted our illustrious institutes of education as a solution to problems, instead of their cause; probably because the Department of Education has the word education right in its name, and that sounded so promising. I wont go into all the spectacular examples that have proven this line of thinking obsolete, but I think most people who are not either Shaun King or professors teaching seminars entitled Why All White Men Are Hitler would agree that these institutions are largely failing to educate anybody. This fact is not likely to change overnight, but merely extricating the government from them accomplishes one vitally important end quashing the illusion of entitlement that is destroying our country.

One of the first experiences many people have when officially reaching adulthood is navigating college. When state schools are so heavily funded by taxes, supplemented by state-run student loans and grants, students are immediately handed a large sum of their tuition for free and thereby unaware of the true cost of education. According to the New America Foundation (cited in The Atlantic), the federal government (your taxes) spent $69 billion on funding for higher education in 2013 (and that does not include loans). Worse, as soon as students arrive on campus, peppy student body representatives are handing these mini adults their free condoms, meal cards, and bus passes. Two seconds after reaching adulthood, they are having the idea that life is supposed to be free reinforced.

Women are oppressed by their own fertility and must be compensated. We are all victims of natural hunger and must have meals provided by well, it doesnt really matter who is paying for it, as long as WE are not. No apartments are available next to campus, so we need transportation somebody needs to cover that. And we have the right to receive education, in the area of our interest, be it interpretive dance or something even less practical.

Furthermore, we have the right to be assisted by tax money in these endeavors. If we shockingly find ourselves unable to secure a spot in a wildly successful dance company, we can have our student loans forgiven, as if doing so just required an apology and a conciliatory handshake. We have a right, nay, a DUTY, to pursue our destiny.

Mind you, I am not discouraging individuals or businesses who want to assist struggling students in these areas. Quite the contrary. I am merely pointing out that by having the government do it, we are eliminating the faces of the generous donors and the natural gratitude that often follows direct receipt of a gift. We are replacing that with the impression that these services somehow grow on trees. There is a condom tree, a bus pass tree, and a tree that produces the gelatin dessert served in your dining hall.

This may account for the tree-hugging movement among environmentalists. They got their degrees at these schools.

Unfortunately, once the government has sold this lie to students, it has them in prime position to sell them more. Consider that if these items did grow on trees, the government would tax and regulate them until they were prohibitively expensive, then heroically find ways to cut costs for students by making somebody else pay for it. The legislators who did this would now be considered champions of equality and education by the students, even as they grift those very students future selves out of tax money.

And thus, the cycle of government dependence is born at the commencement of higher education. State-sponsored universities are creating citizens who see legislators as saviors and imagined entitlements as natural resources.

Eliminating government involvement is not likely to turn clueless students into responsible adults overnight, but it will hopefully avoid our current crisis of sending intelligent young people into expensive schools and having them emerge 4 years later, 50 economic I.Q. points lower.

If we are going to kill the beast of overreaching government, we need to go for the jugular: tax-funded higher education.

Like Loading...

More:

Muh State Universities: Breaking Free of Indoctrination - Being Libertarian

Being Libertarian

The Next Step for Liberty: Mark Sanford 2020 Being Libertarian In 2016, the Libertarian Party put forward the most solid third-party ticket since Theodore Roosevelt's 1912 bid for a third term. It was the first ticket made up of two multi-term governors since Thomas Dewey and Earl Warren's 1948 bid for the Presidency.

See the rest here:

The Next Step for Liberty: Mark Sanford 2020 - Being Libertarian

New York Times

The Isolation of College Libertarians New York Times Leftists, in an effort to make campuses welcoming ostensibly, for everyone end up frequently silencing conservative and libertarian students. They paint any argument that isn't progressive as immoral, so conservative students can find themselves ...

The rest is here:

The Isolation of College Libertarians - New York Times

The Libertarian Party continues to bask in a historic election year, gaining party status and ballot access in more states in 2016. The general platform of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism/tolerance/openness is striking a cord with many voters looking for alternatives outside the two-party political structure.

In some states, like Iowa, the local Libertarian Party is celebrating major party status. However, other Libertarian Parties must fight Republican and Democratic forces to gain the party status or ballot access they believe they rightfully earned after the 2016 elections.

In Tennessee, the state Libertarian Party asked the secretary of state to declare it a qualified political party, according to Ballot Access News. Current law requires minor parties to get at least 5 percent of the vote in the previous gubernatorial election.

The last gubernatorial election was in 2014, when 5% of the vote was 67,687. The partyscase for qualified party status is that Gary Johnson received70,397 votes. I reached out to the chairman of the Libertarian Party of Tennessee for comment, and will update the article with the chairmans comments.

The Libertarian Parties in Ohio and Washington stateare also fighting state officials on being denied major party status, despite Johnsons success in 2016. In Washington, the secretary of state added the total number of write-in votes to the total presidential count to drop the Libertarian Party below the required number (5% of the vote total) to obtain major party status.

The Ohio Libertarian Party has long been locked in conflict and litigation with the states Republican secretary of state, Jon Husted, over candidates being denied access to the ballot and denying the party recognized status. Multiple lawsuits have been filed by the Libertarian Party against Husted, which have had no success before the Supreme Court.

Husted denied the Libertarian Party of Ohio recognized party status because Gary Johnson had to run in the state as an independent, even though he was the Libertarians presidential nominee. The party had been previously stripped of its party status and the state would not let Johnson run under the Libertarian label.

These are just a fewexamples of the struggles the Libertarian Party and other minor parties experience just to get on the ballot. In many states, the petition requirements to appear on the general election ballot area deterrent. And even if a minor party believes it can get the signatures necessary, many fear legal challenges from the major parties that could potentially cripple theirparty financially.

The Libertarian Party of Illinoischallenged a law before the Seventh Circuit Court of Appealsthatmakes it harder for third parties to gain ballot access. An update from the Courthouse News Serviceindicates that the court may be poised to rule in the Libertarian Partys favor. It would be a big win for Libertarians not only in Illinois, but across the country.

Link:

Libertarian Ballot Access Fight against Two-Party Duopoly Grows Stronger - IVN News

Being Libertarian

Why Libertarians Should Support Trump's Infrastructure Plan - Being ... Being Libertarian I either didn't like or was skeptical of practically everything he promised. Though, when he won in November, I may have been relieved that the White House ... and more »

See the rest here:

Why Libertarians Should Support Trump's Infrastructure Plan - Being ... - Being Libertarian

By Thomas L. Knapp

Feb. 7: Muhammad Ali Jr., returning to the U.S. from a speaking engagement in Jamaica, is detained for two hours at Florida's Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and questioned about his name and religious beliefs.

Feb. 22: Passengers disembarking from a domestic (San Francisco to New York) flight at JFK airport are held up by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents demanding their IDs.

Feb. 24: Jeffrey Tucker of the Foundation for Economic Education clears the usual security checks at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta Airport en route to Mexico. Then, while actually boarding the plane, he and the other passengers on the flight are stopped by U.S. Marshals demanding that they submit to retinal scans.

You're probably thinking that this is the point where I'll take a break to blame Donald Trump. It isn't. It's the point where I'll take a break to remind Americans who've been voting for politicians who promise to "secure the border" and other such authoritarian nonsense that THIS is exactly what they've been voting for.

When advocating for the libertarian position on immigration ("open borders," which also happens to have been the position Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush both took in the 1980 Republican presidential primary debates), I usually prefer to stick to the moral argument. That argument, put simply, is that where peaceful people move to, settle or work is nobody's business but theirs.

But there are practical arguments against America's increasingly draconian immigration laws too. Enforcement is expensive but, fortunately, almost certain to be ineffectual (if it worked, severe economic downturn would be the result).

The most important of the practical arguments, in my opinion, is that a police state built to persecute immigrants will necessarily persecute everyone else as well.

I've spoken with friends who traveled in the old Soviet Union and eastern Europe before the Berlin Wall came down. They see near-complete similarity between those regimes and the operations of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection and Border Patrol forces.

The difference between pre-reunification East Germany and the 100-mile wide "constitution-free zone" along the U.S.-Mexico border is the flag the agencies in question salute. Recent administrations have worked to expand that zone to cover the entire country and the Trump administration seems bent on finishing the job.

The near-total police state blossoming before our eyes is the inevitable result of America's 70-year romance with the astoundingly stupid idea that it's the government's business to monitor and control who travels, lives and works where.

America had legally open borders for its first century as a nation, and nearly so for half a century after that. It wasn't until after World War II that one even needed a passport to enter or leave the United States.

Open borders worked. Freedom worked.

The subsequent seven decades of attempts at rigorous immigration control have irrefutably established that our choice is not between open borders and closed borders, but between immigration freedom or totalitarian government. And Americans' time to stop the stampede toward the latter is running short.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

See the original post here:

Libertarian View: The immigration enforcement police state is here - SouthCoastToday.com

When Nigel Farage, the man behind #Brexit, spoke at CPAC 2017, I was pleasantly surprised. As a fan of that event myself, but not a Trump supporter, I assumed that many attached to Britains separation from the European Union might also be aligned similarly and, therefore, be less apt to associate with President Trumps more aggressive approach. So the mere appearance was nice enough, but when Mr. Farage then stuck around to mingle and chat, I was more than pleasantly surprised I was blown away.

I came [to CPAC] two years ago, Farage explained when discussing his past relationship to the event with us just outside the ballroom doors. There are a lot more young people here [than last time]. So there is more of a buzz and excitement in the air. Winning does that.

And winning is certainly something both Farage and Trump have in common. And the POTUS even promised more winning for America in his own speech that kicked off the second full day of events at CPAC at the top of the morning. That appearance, which contained a healthy mix of truth and fiction (Trump claimed that he had a line going back six blocks of fans waiting for him at the Gaylord Convention Center; he did not), set the tone as being quite cheeky. The President started things off with a joke: that if the audience never sat down, the dishonest media would likely be able to spin that into a headline claiming that he received no standing ovation. Ha.

But that rhetoric clearly works. The man got elected. And while sitting in the audience during the speech, I was involuntarily back-slapped and elbow-jabbed by an elderly gentleman to my right who kept raving about how bright he thought Trump was, and how he would wager that Trump has a lot more in common with us than with them. Us vs. them. And there it was Trumps winning formula. Not only was his a strategy of populism, but a type of populism based around the concept of the frontier of antagonism. Want solidarity? Unite against a common enemy. Except with Trump, the common enemy is everyone.

Well, everyone except Bernie Sanders. I like Bernie, Trump proclaimed at one point during his appearance.

Luckily, the trend of an open and accepting CPAC, which started one day prior, continued into this day, which saw yet another conservative minority group setting up shop and voicing their views.

This time, it was a group of black Americans who were not only pro-Trump, but adamantly against what they saw as the media-pushed idea that Trump or Republicans at large, are racist. I have always been for God, but now I am also for the Republicans, proclaimed Maurice Symonette, the group leader and administrator of the website Gods2. Symonette continued by pulling from history on behalf of the Republicans and citing failed regulation policies to disparage the Democrats: The Republicans fought to free us; the Democrats are the ones who want to keep us enslaved. The shirts worn by everyone in the group read as follows: TRUMP & Republicans Are Not Racist.

Even more surprises were found as well once one entered The Bone Zone, a booth on the show floor dedicated to taking pictures with overnight sensation Ken Bone, because of what Mr. Bone was actually doing at CPAC. Contrary to what a lot of people may thing, Ken is much more than just a meme he is currently working with a company called Victory Holdings, which is itself developing an app known as DonorDex that aims to provide a network of potential donors for small-profile and third party political candidates to reach out to with but a touch of a button. In this way, Mr. Bone hopes to raise awareness about this new service and therefore make it easier for underdog candidates to truly compete with the elite politicians they will run against. Not a bad idea, at all.

While there were some misfired attempts at humor (because Republicans), such as a sign depicting a shady looking cartoon character reaching into his pants and proclaiming lets get fiscal, the environment at CPAC was largely one of genuine chill and fun. Whispers of an exclusive party held by Breitbart on a reserved boat began circulating; certain attendees showed up who, while not scheduled speakers, were celebrities in their own right (such as Cassandra Fairbanks, a journalist and ex-Bernie Sanders supporter who very publicly switched her allegiances to Trump after Hillary got the Democratic nomination).

Whether one wants to admit it or not, modern conservatism has become cool again. And CPAC 2017 was the place to be in that regard.

This post was written by Micah J. Fleck.

The views expressed here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect our views and opinions.

Like Loading...

Read more here:

CPAC On My Mind: Part Two - Being Libertarian

The Libertarian Cato Institute released a study in 2016 that actually disproves Donald Trumps theory that banning Muslims from entering the United States will save American lives. That likely wasnt the intention of Cato, but their own work proves that Trump is full of it. Ring of Fires Farron Cousins discusses this.

Transcript of the above video:

The Libertarian Cato Institute actually released a report in 2016 that incidentally happened to completely disprove everything that Donald Trump and his Administration have told us about the intended effects of their Muslim ban. Now as it stands right now the Administration is currently redrafting that executive order to make it into something that the courts are not going to rip apart. The likelihood of them being successful with that, extremely low considering the fact that these are not lawyers, these are not people who understand foreign policy. Its likely theyre going to write something thats not exactly going to pass the muster when it comes to being legal.

However, this Cato Institute study from 2016 shows that in the years between 1975 and 2015, a 40 year span, there were 20 incidents where refugees entered the United States and committed acts of violence. In those 40 years, of those 20 people who were refugees three people were killed. 40 years, 20 refugees involved in incidents. Only three people killed.

Contrast that with home grown terrorism. I mean, how many people died in the Oklahoma City bombing? How many people have been killed by right wing hate groups? I mean just this week two men were killed by one white man because he thought they were Muslims. He thought they were Middle Easterners. Turns out they were from India. They were engineers, very well respected people with huge educations, working to make things in the world better, and he murdered them in a hate crime because he thought they were Middle Eastern, as if thats some sort of justification for killing another human being. While he murdered them he was yelling, Get out of my country. No. You get out of the country. Thats not what we do here in the United States.

I bet if Donald Trump and his Administration actually looked in to the amount of terrorism being caused by white men in the United States, maybe wed have a different kind of travel ban. Its not hard to identify the problem when you look at all the variables. Now the Cato Institute Study was just trying to figure out if refugees coming into the United States were a threat or not. It turns out according to Cato that theyre not. If we want to address the real threats we have to look at all the data. We have to look at the acts of home grown terrorism being committed by white men in the United States, because those are the treats. Those are the real problems. The people who take over a wildlife refuge in Oregon, the people who have standoffs with federal officers in the SouthWest, those are terrorists. Those are people that we need to be worried about. Those are people that we should probably be afraid of. Those are people that should spend the rest of their lives behind bars because that is illegal.

Those are the people that we should be worrying about, but instead the Trump Administration, Republicans in general, theyve created these Middle Eastern boogeymen, telling us that we need to be afraid of them coming over here and trying to kill us. Meanwhile, the real people who pose a threat to our very lives are the ones around us. Maybe the crazy neighbor, maybe the guy down the street. The people that you wouldnt ordinarily think because statistically they pose a far greater threat to our lives here in the United States than anyone coming over as a refugee.

Read the original:

Libertarian Think Tank Proves That Trump's Muslim Ban Won't Work - The Ring of Fire Network