Jonestown at Sea: Libertarians and the Pitfalls of Sea-cession

Essays

Jonestown at Sea: Libertarians and the Pitfalls of Sea-cession

By Shawn Hamilton December 1, 2013

[slideshow_deploy id=’1837′] To their credit libertarians often present fascinating thought experiments for us to ponder. What would you do if you were trapped in the freezing cold and had to break into someone else’s house to save your own life? If you fell off a building and found yourself dangling from a flagpole – a privately owned flagpole – would you continue to hang waiting for help or would you refuse to violate the flag owner’s property rights and plunge to your death? Most respondents answer the same way a non-libertarian would, but that these kinds of questions are even up for debate tells us a lot about the libertarian mindset, which brings me to one of their more audacious experiments that could be coming to fruition: seasteading. Freedom Ship International, a (for now at least) Florida based company, is building the “Freedom Ship” – a 25 story high,…

Diablogs

Race and Republicans: Part 2 of a Diablog with Geoff Kabaservice

By Shawn Hamilton November 21, 2013

Dear Shawn, I hope you’re right that Herman Cain will make another presidential run! Reporters everywhere will rejoice, especially since they will no longer have Michele Bachmann around to entertain them. But I think we both agree that Republicans will continue to have immense difficulty attracting minority votes whether their presidential nominee is Cain or almost any other of the likely candidates. I’m going to dodge your question about how to define a moderate, at least for the moment. I’d like to go back to the Republican National Committee post-2012 “autopsy” I mentioned in my previous post. The RNC view is that the Republican Party isn’t winning the votes of minority groups because it hasn’t done a good job of reaching out to them. That’s true, even by the standards of the party’s past performance. The GOP’s outreach efforts to Asian-Americans, for example, were much more extensive and successful during…

Essays

The Wilderness – President Obama and the Conservative Movement

By Shawn Hamilton November 12, 2012

As the post-election euphoria wears off, many of President Obama’s supporters – myself among them – ponder his future and that of the conservative movement. Conservatives seem to be moving through the various stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance – though not necessarily in that order, leading many of my more optimistic and level-headed friends to suggest that it is now time for President Obama to work with moderate conservatives to get things done. This point of view reminds me of the story of St. James Davis and his pet chimp Moe. St. James and his wife LaDonna raised their chimpanzee Moe from a baby like a son. He learned to eat with a fork. Speak some sign language. Make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. He could nod ‘yes’ or shake his head ‘no’. He played with toys and occasionally wore a dinner jacket and trousers…

Essays

Voters and Lepers

By Shawn Hamilton September 27, 2012

The Voter ID debate demands that one acknowledge the obvious, but then advance the absurd. Of course voter fraud occurs. Lyndon Johnson stole his first election back in 1948. Kennedy pulled some funny business in 1960 in Chicago. Dead people vote. Felons vote. People vote more than once on occasion. Sure. It happens, but to justify spending hundreds of millions of dollars on Voter ID implementation one would need to prove that Voter ID fraud is so pervasive that the integrity of the democratic process is in danger, which appears to not be the case. Investigations in Colorado and Florida revealed that about .001% of voters committed fraud. In North Carolina the number was even lower .0002%. To nab Colorado’s 35 fraudulent voters would cost the state (or feds depending on whose footing the bill) six million dollars or $171K per violator. To give some perspective, leprosy occurs in about…