For those who don’t know, esr is the common psuedonym of Eric S. Raymond, hacker laureate and open source evangelist. I’d say that esr’s writings are some of what re-ignited my interest in programming a few years back, and he’s done a great job of recording some of the fascinating bits of “hacker culture” in the hacker’s dictionary and some other essays.
Now, Eric is a self-described neo-pagan libertarian; so there’s little doubt that I’d disagree with him on a host of political, social, and moral issues; however, his take on the war (and several other things) is bang on with my own. I’ve taken a back seat to blogging about politics, these days, but I figured I was overdue to bring it up, so I thought I’d send a link over to some of his recent writing: The “Bush Lied” Lie.
Eric does a great job of trying to envisage the choices the president would have been faced with, and the conclusions that he would… and should, in his (and my) opinion… have drawn.
A later post goes into some great points about why a libertarian who is generally anti-war would support this war. Again, some great points.
I gave a few moments thought, today, to the sometimes odd convergence of conservative and libertarian ideas. I think one of the main reasons these two groups have so much common ground, while still maintaining wide ideological variance, is that they generally share the same view of people, property, and freedom. The main difference (some poli-sci major will disagree with me, that’s okay) that I see between the two is the conservative bent toward a more Judeo-Christian moral standard, while a libertarian would be more likely to say, “As long as you aren’t hurting anyone, I don’t care what you do.”
Another way of saying that is to say that if you took most conservatives, and removed their moral ideology, what remained would resemble libertarianism more than it would modern liberalism (leftism, neo-marxism, whatever).
There are doubltess many more ideological differences between conservatives and libertarians than just the morality issues, but I think it’s safe to say that those are the main issues. In this matter of the war on terror, however, I think that Eric’s writings show that just because someone is not a “conservative” or a Republican, doesn’t mean that one can’t come to the same logical conclusion about the war on terror, and the war in Iraq; it’s necessary. No one wants it, but some people realize it needs to be fought.
