Monthly Archives: January 2020

The targeted assassination of guilty people is ethically superior to war. The assassination-by-drone policy of the Trump regime is ethically bad for the same reason, and therefore morally wrong, and libertarians are right to condemn it.

Over at the Washington Examiner a great online site that promotes conservative, libertarian, and fusionist views inside the Beltway Philip Klein has an article on what at first glance looks like an inconsistency in libertarian thought.(1)

On the one hand, Klein writes, prominent libertarians of the past (including presidential candidates Ron Paul and Harry Browne) long advocated assassination as a better alternative to war.

On the other hand, Libertarians were among the most vocal critics of President Trumps decision to order the killing of Iranian terrorist leader Qassem Soleimani by drone assassination this month. Klein is clearly referring to, not constitutional objections about the lack of congressional authorization, but the normative or ethics-based substantive criticism of whether its a good idea to take out a prominent foreign leader the way the Trump administration did.

Klein is correct about both hands. But there is no inconsistency. A libertarian can consider assassination a better option than war not just better strategically, but also better ethically while condemning Soleimanis killing, and indeed the Trump regimes whole policy of assassination by drone, as being ethically unacceptable.

Not only are the two positions compatible, but they are consistent. Both follow from a fundamental libertarian principle: killing innocent people is ethically wrong.

By Kleins account, Browne relied on exactly that principle to make his case for assassination:

Browne, who was the Libertarian presidential nominee in 1996 and 2000, explicitly argued that the United States should offer a bounty on the heads of our enemies. In Why Government Doesnt Work, the manifesto for his 1996 campaign, he made the case against the first Iraq War for its toll on innocent victims. Assume Saddam Hussein really was a threat, he posited. Is that a reason to kill innocent people and expose thousands of Americans to danger? Isnt there a better way for a President to deal with a potential enemy?. He wrote: Would the President be condoning cold-blooded killing? Yes but of just one guilty person, rather than of the thousands of innocents who die in bombing raids.

Soleimanis funding and arming of terrorist groups like Hamas made him an enabler of terrorism. Since terrorists and their enablers kill innocent people, they themselves are not innocent people; therefore, killing them does not violate the prohibition on killing innocents. If a libertarian bystander at the airport where Soleimani died, or a sniper stationed a mile away, had shot the terrorist enabler, there would have been no violation of libertarian principles.

In contrast, a war with Iran would invariably involve the use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). By WMD I mean weapons that are designed to kill indiscriminately: Bombs dropped on cities by airplanes (the predominant means by which the U.S. government wages war today) qualify as WMD under this definition. It is possible to use WMD without killing innocents in some cases such as bombing a military convoy in a desert but the odds of bombing a city without killing even one innocent (one child, for example) are astronomically low. This makes a targeted assassination clearly superior to the bombing campaigns that would inevitably occur in a war. If one can accomplish a goal X by two methods, A (which means killing innocents) and B (which avoids killing innocents), then B is the ethical alternative: B is exactly what a libertarian should do.

Similarly, when Paul called for issuing letters of marque and reprisal (a term he used to mean authorizing acts by both U.S. Special Operations troops and private contractors) against terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden, he

proposed a bill that would have allowed Congress to authorize the President to specifically target Bin Laden and his associates using non-government armed forces.

The words specifically target are all-important: Paul advocated targeted killing of specific individuals, on the grounds that they were terrorists who were guilty of shedding innocent blood. Paul did not advocate the killing of innocents, but the fatal use of force against certain non-innocents and no one else.

It is virtually impossible to stretch this libertarian idea of assassination to include killing by drones. Drones carry bombs, and bombs carried by drones are no less WMD than bombs dropped from airplanes. Their use is always ethically questionable, and they should be used only in cases where innocent blood is not spilled along with the guilty.

Were any innocent lives killed in the bombing attack that killed Soleimani? I dont know; I doubt that anyone knows. I do know, by listening to the Trump administrations statements on the killing, that they do not care: whether they killed innocent people was simply not a consideration for them. That alone is enough to make Soleimanis assassination objectionable to a libertarian. While the drone attack was ethically better than bombing an Iranian city, since it killed less innocent lives, and even possibly no innocent lives at all, being ethically better does not make it ethically good. It remains an ethically bad, or wrong, action, and the U.S. policy of drone assassination that led to it remains ethically bad, or wrong, policy.

Unfortunately, Klein touches on the use of drones and bombs only tangentially and not by name, and only to shrug it off with a But:

There are specific circumstances surrounding the Soleimani killing that may make it particularly objectionable to libertarians. But the idea of targeting bad actors as an alternative to large-scale bombing raids is not incompatible with noninterventionist foreign policy sentiments.

From the standpoint of libertarian principles (as opposed to noninterventionist sentiments), the targeted assassination of guilty people of those who have themselves shed innocent blood is ethically superior to war. At the same time, the assassination-by-drone policy of the Trump regime, and the Obama and Bush regimes, is ethically bad for the same reason, and therefore morally wrong and libertarians are right to condemn it.

(1) Philip Klein, Prominent libertarians once advocated assassination as an alternative to war, Washington Examiner, January 8, 2020. Web, Jan. 24, 2020. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/prominent-libertarians-once-advocated-assassination-as-an-alternative-to-war

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Libertarianism and assassination - Nolan Chart LLC

Peter Thiel. Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images

In mid-January, at the conclusion of a special meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society, the venerable free-market organization, after appearances by Condoleezza Rice and Niall Ferguson, Peter Thiel was slated to give closing remarks on Big Tech and the Question of Scale. The keynote was the latest in a series of public remarks and interviews in which the PayPal founder and Facebook investor showed his prominence in conservative politics.

Thiel has long been a political donor; in 2016, he gave $4million across various campaigns, including $1 million to a super-PAC supporting Trump, on whose behalf Thiel spoke at the Republican National Convention. Hes known to have funded right-wing hoaxer James OKeefe and has been an enthusiastic sponsor of organizations for activists and intellectuals, like The Stanford Review, a conservative publication he founded in the 1980s. Earlier this month, he announced an investment in a Midwest-focused venture-capital fund led by Hillbilly Elegy author and social conservative J.D. Vance.

But unlike other major right-wing donors, Thiel seems intent on being known for his intellect as much as his wallet. Over the past year, he has played the role of outraged patriot, endorsing Trumps trade war and bizarrely accusing Google of seemingly treasonous behavior in its China dealings. He intermittently lectures at Stanford. Vanity Fair has written about his hot-ticket L.A. dinner parties, where guests (including, at least once, the president) hold deep discussions about the issues of the day. Last year, George Mason University professor and economist Tyler Cowen called Thiel the most influential conservative intellectual with other conservative and libertarian intellectuals.

This emerging Republican macher is a far cry from the ultralibertarian seditionist who used to encourage entrepreneurs to exit the United States and start their own countries at sea. But Thiel is no stranger to inconsistency. For decades, he cultivated a reputation as a radical Silicon Valley anti-statist; in 2009, he wrote that Facebook, in which he was an early investor, might create the space for new modes of dissent and new ways to form communities not bounded by historical nation-states. Yet, six years earlier, he had co-founded the most aggressively statist company in the 21st century: Palantir, the global surveillance company used, for example, to monitor Iranian compliance with the nuclear deal. Can you really claim to uphold individual freedom if youre profiting from a mass-surveillance government contractor? Are you really a libertarian if youre a prominent supporter of Trump?

It would be easy enough to chalk up the seeming contradiction of Thiels thought to opportunism or pettiness (he famously funded a lawsuit, in secret, to bankrupt Gawker, my former employer) or perhaps even a mind less ambidextrous than incoherent. But its worth trying to understand his political journey. Thiels increasing prominence as both an intellectual in and benefactor of the conservative movement and his status as a legend in Silicon Valley makes him at least as important as more public tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg. In fact, he still holds sway over Zuckerberg: Recent reports suggest Thiel was the most influential voice in Facebooks decision to allow politicians to lie in ads on its platform. What Thiel believes now is likely to influence the next generation of conservative and libertarian thinkers if not what the president believes the next day.

How to square Thiels post-national techno-libertarianism with his bloodthirsty authoritarian nationalism? Strangely, he wants both. Todays Thielism is a libertarianism with an abstract commitment to personal freedom but no particular affection for democracy or even for politics as a process by which people might make collective decisions about the distribution of power and resources. Thiel has wed himself to state power not in an effort to participate in the political process but as an end run around it.

If we wanted to construct a genealogy of late Thielism, one place to start might be a relatively little-read essay Thiel wrote in 2015 for the conservative religious journal First Things. Thiel is a Christian, though clearly a heterodox believer, and in Against Edenism, he makes the case that science and technology are natural allies to what he sees as the inborn optimism of Christianity. Christians are natural utopians, Thiel believes, and because there will be no returning to the prelapsarian paradise of Eden, they should support technological progress, although it may mean joining with atheist optimists, personified in the essay by Goethes Faust. At least Faust was motivated to try to do something about everything that was wrong with the world, even if he did, you know, sell his immortal soul to the Devil.

Thiel suggests that growth is essentially a religious obligation building the kingdom of heaven today, here on Earth and that stagnation is, well, demonic the chaotic sea where the demon Leviathan lives. This binary appears frequently in Thiels writing, where progress is always aligned with technology and the individual, and chaos with politics and the masses. If Thiel has an apocalyptic fear of stasis, you can begin to see why his politics have changed over the past few years, as it has become less clear whether the booming technology industry has actually added much to the economy or to human happiness, let alone demonstrated progress.

Where some of his fellow libertarians have moved toward the center, attempting to build a liberaltarianism with a relatively strong welfare state and mass democratic appeal, others have found themselves articulating a version of what Tyler Cowen, in a recent blog post, called state capacity libertarianism, a concept he says was influenced by Thiels thinking. In its essence, its the admission that strong states remain necessary to maintain and extend capitalism and markets. Where Thiel would differ with state-capacity libertarians like Cowen is that he isnt merely a believer in strong states in the abstract as agents of economic progress. He is purported to be a specifically American national conservative, at least per his conference-keynote schedule. Thiel has suggested in the past that such a conservative nationalism is the only thing that can provide the cohesion necessary to re-create a strong state. Identity politics, he suggested in an address at the Manhattan Institute, the free-market think tank, is a distraction that stops us from acting at the scale that we need to be focusing on for this country. MAGA politics is the only way to grow.

This is the context in which it makes sense for a gay, cosmopolitan libertarian like Thiel to throw his support behind a red-meat conservative like Senate candidate Kris Kobach of Kansas. The technological progress Thiel associates with his own personal freedom and power is threatened by market failure and political chaos. A strong centralized state can restore order, breed progress, and open up new technologies, markets, and financial instruments from which Thiel might profit. And as long as it allows Thiel to make money and host dinner parties, who cares if its borders are cruelly and ruthlessly enforced? Who cares if its leader is an autocrat? Who cares, for that matter, if its democratic? In fact, it might be better if it werent: If the lefts commitment to identity politics is divisive enough to prevent technological advancement, its threat outstrips the kind of bellicose religious authoritarianism that Kobach represents. A Thielist government would be aggressive toward China, a country Thiel is obsessed with while also seeming, in its centralized authority and close ties between government and industry, very much like it.

There is, of course, another context in which it makes sense for Thiel to join forces with social conservatives and nationalists: his bank account. Thiels ideological shifts have matched his financial self-interest at every turn. His newfound patriotism is probably best understood as an alliance of convenience. The U.S. government is the vessel best suited for reaching his immortal techno-libertarian future (and a lower tax rate), and he is happy to ride it as long as it and he are traveling in the same direction. And if it doesnt work out, well, he did effectively buy New Zealand citizenship.

*This article appears in the January 20, 2020, issue ofNew York Magazine. Subscribe Now!

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Peter Thiels Latest Venture Is the American Government - New York Magazine

In just over a month voters will decide who they want to see on the ballot in the 2020 general election. Early voting for the March 3 primary will begin in the middle of February and run up until Saturday, Feb. 29.

Heres everything you need to know about when, where and how to vote:

Where:

Two polling locations will be open for early voting, the Market Place Shopping Center, 1740 E. Dixon Blvd near Hobby Lobby and Bargain Hunt and the Kings Mountain Fire Museum, 269 Cleveland Ave.

How long do I have to vote?

Polls will open Thursday, Feb. 13, and will remain open every weekday through the 28th. Saturday, Feb. 29 will be the final day of early voting. Polls will open from 8 a.m.-7:30 p.m. every day except for Feb. 29, when they will close at 3 p.m.

Do I need to register?

The deadline to register to vote or to make any changes to current voter registration has passed. However, voters will be allowed to same-day register and vote during the early voting period.

Do I need an ID?

A federal district court has temporarily blocked North Carolinas voter photo ID requirement from taking effect. Unless the courts direct otherwise, this means that voters will not be required to provide photo ID when they vote in the primary election on March 3.

Registration information:

All Cleveland County registered voters are eligible to participate in the upcoming Presidential Preference and Primary Election. Three parties - Republican, Democrat, Libertarian conduct semi-closed primaries. Two parties - Green, Constitution conduct closed primaries.

This means that if you want to vote for a particular candidate, you must pick which primary you wish to participate in. Registered Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, Green Party and Constitution Party voters must all vote for their parties only.

Unaffiliated voters will choose one party to vote for in the primary election.

Who is on the ballot?

Depending on which primary you choose, your ballot could have as many as 13 races to vote in or as few as one. Green, Libertarian and Constitution party primaries only decide who they want to see on the presidential ballot later this year. Republican and Democrat voters will decide which candidates get to appear in presidential, school board, county commission, governor and other state and federal ballots in November.

Sample ballots are available at the Cleveland County Board of Elections.

Excerpt from:
Six things to know about the primary election - Shelby Star

Joe Rogan is one of the most influential people in media. That doesn't mean he's a good interviewer or a responsible communicator when speaking to a large and devoted audience, but it is a fact. It's hard to pinpoint the exact size of his podcast's audience, but Rogans official YouTube channel has 7.3 million subscribers and he recently claimed his podcast gets 190 million downloads a month.

When Elon Musk goes on Rogans show and smokes a blunt, Tesla stocks take a tumble (though as Rogan notes at every opportunity, they quickly bounced back). It was a big deal when Bernie Sanders sat down with Rogan for an hour-long interview in August, and an even bigger deal earlier this week when Rogan said that he would probably vote for Sanders in the upcoming election. Sanders is not the first presidential candidate to go on Rogan's podcastTulsi Gabbard has been on several timesnor is Sanders the first candidate to get something resembling an endorsement from Rogan. Rogan hosted and voted for Libertarian Gary Johnson in 2016.

On Thursday, Sanders tweeted a clip from Rogan's podcast highlighting his endorsement, in which Rogan said he likes Sanders for career-long consistency in his politics.

Rogan's endorsement of Sanders is notable because unlike Johnson, Sanders has an actual shot at taking the White House, and in a close race, gaining the support of even a portion of Rogans massive, loyal audience could be a difference maker. Whats less clear is why the Sanders campaign embraced and promoted the endorsement, knowing that Rogan is controversial and hated by parts of his base. Rogans endorsement is so influential, his audience so large, that its not even clear Sanders needed to acknowledge it because Rogans audience rivals (and is likely larger than) his own. Who is Sanders reaching with a Joe Rogan video clip that Rogan hasnt already reached?

Rogan's endorsement, and the video Sanders shared on Twitter in particular, has caused some controversy among people who argue that Rogan is a bigot who should be marginalized, ignored, or disavowed.

Rogan hasn't wielded his power with much responsibility: He's given people like Chuck Johnson, Milo Yiannopoulos, Alex Jones, Stefan Molyneux, and Gavin McInnes access to his gigantic audience, and Rogan rarely challenges his guests on their views, allowing them to launder their bad ideas on his show. Data & Society researcher Becca Lewis has argued that Rogan giving a platform to these people has led his audience down more extremist rabbit holes on YouTube. Lewis describes Rogan as a "libertarian influencer with mainstream appeal."

"When [Rogan] hosts other members of the Intellectual Dark Web, it's easy to get drawn into that world," Lewis told Motherboard in 2018. That Rogan is an entry point to other YouTube and podcast influencers speaks to his own influence; whether Rogan's endorsement matters doesn't depend on whether Rogan himself is GOOD or BAD, it's whether his endorsement moves the needle. And given how much discussion there is about his endorsement and what we know about Rogan's overall influence, it almost certainly does.

A big part of Rogan's appeal is that he's an average Joe. Sitting down with him for an interview is not the same as doing a quick spot on CNN or Fox News. His interviews are long (often more than three hours), meandering, and silly. It gives subjects the chance to speak at length and often put their foot in their mouth. For his listeners, a recommendation from Rogan is like a recommendation from a friend, if your friend was talking to millions of people at once. It has the appearance of raw, emotional authenticity. It is the exact opposite of a measured, calculated endorsement from the

New York Times.

What seems to have made lots of people mad, however, is that Sanders has embraced the endorsement. Whats worth noting is that its not clear that Sanders sharing the video is actually going to earn him any more voters. Sanders, of course, has a huge audience, but Sanders reach is almost certainly smaller than Rogans. Sanders clip has 3.2 million views on Twitter. Rogans audience fluctuates and its notoriously difficult to get reliable podcast statistics (especially if you dont work for that podcast), but if Rogans 190 million downloads per month figure is accurate, we could conservatively estimate that each episode is getting far more than 3.2 million downloads.

This is why its impossible to amplify Joe Rogan: He has an audience bigger than nearly anyone in the country, and to ignore that he exists and that people like him is to remove yourself from reality. Theres little danger in Sanders tweeting this video and radicalizing people because Rogans audience is already huge. But sharing the video and tacitly accepting Rogans endorsement feels like an unforced error, or at least a risk Sanders didnt need to take: Hes opened himself up to criticism from parts of his base who care about social justice, marginalized people, and stand against the people and ideas Rogan has allowed to be laundered on his show, without really standing to gain anything.

"The goal of our campaign is to build a multi-racial, multi-generational movement that is large enough to defeat Donald Trump and the powerful special interests whose greed and corruption is the root cause of the outrageous inequality in America," the Sanders campaign told Motherboard in a statement. "Sharing a big tent requires including those who do not share every one of our beliefs, while always making clear that we will never compromise our values. The truth is that by standing together in solidarity, we share the values of love and respect that will move us in the direction of a more humane, more equal world."

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Joe Rogans Endorsement Is One of the Most Influential in America - VICE

Official Oklahoma voter registration statistics released yesterday show 2,090,107 Oklahomans are registered to vote heading into the 2020 election cycle. Oklahomas official voter registration statistics are counted every year on January 15.

"These statistics continue a decades-long trend of growth for Independents and Republicans as a share of the Oklahoma electorate," said State Election Board Secretary Paul Ziriax. "And although they are relatively small in overall numbers, Libertarians now have more than 11,000 voters for the first time in state history."

The largest number of Oklahoma's voters are Republicans, who make up more than 48.3% of registered voters. Two years ago, Republicans accounted for 46.8% of registered voters.

Democrats are the second-largest party at 35.3% of registered voters, down from 38.2% in January 2018. Democrats had long been the largest political party in Oklahoma, but were passed by Republicans in January 2015.

Independents, or "no party" voters, are now 15.9% of Oklahoma voters, up from 14.8% two years ago.

The Libertarian Party, which gained recognition in 2016, now has 11,171 registered voters, more than double the number in January 2018.

Oklahomas registered voters:

JAN. 15, 2020 JAN. 15, 2018

DEMOCRATS 738,256.35.3% 769,772.38.2%

REPUBLICANS 1,008,569.48.3% 942,621.46.8%

LIBERTARIANS 1,171.less than 1% 4,897.less than 1%

INDEPENDENTS 332,111.15.9% 298,867.14.8%

TOTAL 2,090,107 2,016,157

HISTORICAL VOTER REGISTRATION IN OKLAHOMA

The State Election Board began recording statewide voter registration statistics by party in 1960.

YEAR DEM REP IND OTHER 1960 82.0% 17.6% 0.4% N/A

1980 75.8% 22.8% 1.4% N/A

2000* 56.7% 35.0% 8.3% *

2020* 35.3% 48.3% 15.9% *

*Minor parties account for less than 1 percent of voters in Oklahoma.

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State Election Board Releases Official 2020 Voter Registration Statistics - The Marlow Review