A few months back I stumbled upon the blog, Just a Girl in Short Shorts Talking About Whatever. Written by Becky C, she's a former DA, a lesbian, a mom, a Libertarian, and a whole lotta other things including a mountain climber.
She's kind of a mouthy (this is a good thing, in the sense that she's opinionated) and I guess it's because of her lawyer training she can back up her opinions and she's a talented enough writer that she does it in an entertaining way. Plus, she illustrates a lot of her posts with pictures of hot, semi-naked girls.
And most of the time I agree with her. Affirmation is a wonderful thing, knowing that you're not crazy for thinking the things that you/I do, especially in the liberal Northeast. I've always said you have to watch the left as much as the the right, and Becky gives a person like me a good out in the form of the Libertarian Party. It's really hard living where I do to explain to people that no, I don't feel that Clinton or Obama represent what I believe and how I envision this country. So I don't even try.
Anyway, so first, go read her blog. I think you'll love it.
Second, her post today was about how the mayor of San Francisco is banning the sale of tobacco products from drug stores, saying that tobacco runs counter to the purpose of a drug store, which is supposed to be health, never mind that drug stores also sell Twinkies, which are bad for you, too. This is pure Short Shorts stuff. Funny, irreverent and dead-on, giving the Libertarian view of getting government the hell out of our lives. Especially of getting the government out of our lives as it tries to tell us how to live on on a moral basis.As I've said more than once, along with having to watch the left as much as the right because they both have agendas, I also believe that there is a special spot in hell reserved for the moralists of the world. Because morals and humans don't go hand in hand. Jesus himself said, anyone who is without sin can throw the first stone, and no one did. Moralist always fall, because no human being is that good. (Which is one thing I would love to point out to Obama fans. I guess you had to live through the Kennedy years to understand this feeling though. He's no saint, simply because he's a politician and he's running for president, and that's a tough lesson for young people to learn.)
Anyway, something else I'm fond of pointing out is, with humans, throw logic clean out the window. This is in reference to the Short Shorts posting. We all know the dangers of cigarette smoking and using tobacco products. My father died of heart disease and smoked almost his entire life. He had a stroke on the operating table as he was having triple bypass surgery, and when he finally got home a month later he would go into the basement to sneak a smoke. Doctors once thought I had throat cancer, and I did quit smoking, but I still carry a can of Skoal. You'd think I'd learn, but I don't need the government telling me I'm stupid. I know already know it.
2 comments:
People who speak so lovingly of the Libertarian approach to government are too much like those dewy-eyed college sophomores who wear t-shirts with Che Guevara’s famously silhouetted face: if mindless of the actual consequences of the ideology, it’s incredibly attractive. But more often than not, it means the person espousing that love doesn’t really need an activist government at the ready to defend whatever rights are afforded to them.
One never meets a libertarian from Zimbabwe or Belarus or any other country where the rights of a minority are one whim away from extinction.
Would a ‘hands-off’ approach to say, a Supreme Court decision on the inherent inequality
of segregated schools mean anything if not for a morals-based intervention at the federal level? What would have been the non-intrusive, non-moralizing, muscularly Libertarian response to the
plight of New Orleans residents after Hurricane Katrina struck? Care to imagine the properly libertarian approach to the Roe v. Wade decision? Or Brown v. Board of Education?
There would be no response. And now, imagine a country in which these things weren’t changed. How ‘moral’ a place would that be?
Here’s a simple way to judge the value of the Libertarian governing approach.
The next time a sports riot breaks out, bravely push your way into the center of the mayhem and espouse the wisdom of sending the riot police back to their precincts.
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